tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91453362018-05-21T00:20:49.749-07:00Crawl Across the OceanThis Blog focusses primarily on commercial and government ethics as well as Canadian politics with digressions into international politics and anything else that seems relevant, interesting, amusing, or at the very least better than not posting at allDeclanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.comBlogger1066125This is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site.tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-54870090901911657712016-04-12T08:43:00.003-07:002016-04-12T08:43:38.067-07:00111. Righteous Mind Follow-UpNote: This post is the one hundred and eleventh in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />Previously, I reviewed Jonathan Haidt's 'The Righteous Mind' in <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2012/05/104-righteous-mind-part-1.html" target="_blank">a</a> <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2012/05/105-righteous-mind-part-2.html" target="_blank">series</a> <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2012/06/106-righteous-mind-part-3.html" target="_blank">of</a> <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2012/06/107-righteous-mind-part-4.html" target="_blank">posts</a>, noting at one point that, "Like so many others, Haidt never considers the possibility that morality might be context-sensitive, not just in the sense that some morals might be more useful than others in certain cultures (which he does acknowledge) but that even within one culture some actions might be moral or immoral depending on the context."<br /><br />I was reminded of that when recently&nbsp; I was reading <a href="https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/a-conversation-with-jonathan-haidt-35f76604464a#.aabtsit50" target="_blank">an interview</a> between Tyler Cowen and Jonathan Haidt and came across this quote from Haidt, which is still stuck in the 'one set of morals per culture' mindset, but comes closer than he did in The Righteous Mind to seeing the commerce driven and context sensitive nature of different morals.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="graf--p graf-after--p" id="e9f5" name="e9f5">"If you have a warrior culture, if you’re constantly being attacked, boy, is it going to build on the loyalty, the authority, the sanctity ones, to create this tribal consciousness. You can see that in a joke form in fraternities. Fraternities, even on a secular campus, fraternities will build on those tribal foundations.</div></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="graf--p graf-after--p" id="80c9" name="80c9">&nbsp;Whereas, if you go to, say, Amsterdam, or New York, or places that are port cities with a lot of variety, diversity, commerce, those tend to thin down the moral domain. They don’t tend to do a lot with group loyalty and hierarchy. They tend to focus more on, “I’ll tell you what, you don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you. You honor your contracts, I’ll honor mine.”</div></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="graf--p graf-after--p" id="0d54" name="0d54">This is a more appropriate morality for diversity and for commerce."</div></blockquote><br />The above passage could almost be a direct quote from 'Systems of Survival'.<br />&nbsp; Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com71http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2016/04/111-righteous-mind-follow-up.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-32963019897590451352014-05-19T13:32:00.001-07:002014-05-19T13:32:48.595-07:00110. Great Expectations: The Implacable Externality<i>I saw a sign in front of a shop the other day that read, "We will exceed your expectations." So I walked in expecting them to exceed my expectations. By the time I walked out, I owned the place.</i><br /><br />I've found that having a baby, and then a toddler around the house gives you a new perspective on things. For example, the likely genesis of the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin. Or the persistent belief in the plausibility of developing a perpetual motion machine.<br /><br />Additionally, thinking about a full life ahead for a new person, it made me think about what has changed for the better or for the worse since I was born, with respect to the prospects for a child having the sort of life you might hope for them. On this train of thought, it occurred to me that few of the technological advances made since I was born really register in this sort of calculation. Do I expect my child's life to be better or more fulfilling due to the presence of computers and smartphones and high definition television? Not really.<br /><br />Now, I know, this comes across as a standard 'get-off-my-lawn' rant about how I walked uphill to school both ways in the snow and I liked it, but that's not really what I'm trying to get at. It really is kind of surprising that all the years of inventing and advancing things, all of which was appreciated enough by the people who purchased these advances to make the developers and inventors of new computers and phones and so on the wealthiest people in the world hasn't really moved the needle at all with respect to what level of happiness we might expect in our lives. As a kid, I would take pencil to paper and sketch out visions of fantastic video games well beyond what existed in the market at that time. Sports games where you could manage the whole farm system and run the team like a real GM, adventure games with whole worlds filled with interactive characters and endless open-ended possibilities for development and so on. And pretty much without fail, all those dreams have become reality in the intervening years and it has been pretty cool at times. I still remember the day my Dad brought home the first flat screen monitor we had ever seen and playing Ultima VI on it for the first time. But in the end, did it make my childhood any happier than my Dad's? Maybe, but I'm not sure.<br /><br />The problem, it seems to me, is that almost all advances in comfort and convenience bring a built in negative externality in the form of increased expectations, by which the new level of comfort becomes the expected norm. To put it another way, it is only the rate of change in the level of comfort and convenience that matters to us, not the level. We can see this dynamic at work in so many classic literary tales, Anne goes from unloved and hard done by orphan to a much better life on a farm in P.E.I., while Harry Potter goes from unloved orphan forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs to famous wizard in a world of adventure with his own pile of gold and so on.&nbsp; What we enjoy is not seeing someone suffer, or seeing someone prosper, but seeing the transition from suffering to prosperity, seeing people new to comfort and convenience who can appreciate them in a way that we, born into prosperity, no longer can.<br /><br />Even more on point was<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Loves_to_Fly_and_He_D%27ohs" target="_blank"> an episode</a> of The Simpson's in which Homer gets a chance to ride on a private plane and live in luxury for a couple of days, but finds himself depressed upon returning to his normal middle class life and yearning to return to the world of luxury.<br /><br />Taking matters a step further, many advances in comfort and convenience bring with them an even greater negative externality when the new comfort or convenience allows us to do without some skill we once required. The advent of the personal automobile led to generations of people who couldn't really manage to get around without them. But cars brought new required skills such as learning stick shift, learning to read a map or just learning to drive period. But advances in automatic transmissions have made knowing how to change gears a lost art, GPS makes maps and navigation obsolete and if driverless cars ever become reality, even the basics of pushing a pedal and steering a course will no longer be required. Meanwhile climate control (tailored for each seat), heated seats, rain sensing wipers, DVD players and televisions continually up the ante with respect to comfort and convenience.<br /><br />Movies depicting an apocalypse of one sort or another are pretty thick on the ground these days, but the Pixar film <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wall-e-2008" target="_blank">Wall-E</a>, was somewhat unusual in presenting two distinct apocalyptic scenarios in the same movie. It opens with a relatively standard apocalyptic scenario depicting the failure of our quest for comfort and convenience - a ruined abandoned planet covered in garbage. But later on, up in space, we are faced with another apocalyptic scenario, this one representing the<i> success</i> of our quest for comfort and convenience. On a space cruise ship staffed and managed by robots, humans live a life of such comfort and convenience that they are weak, fat and basically incapable of doing anything for themselves. Wall-E ends with the humans rejecting this life comfort and convenience for the hard work of restoring the planet to live-ability, but so far any sign of a similar change in our trajectory seems quite absent.<br /><br />In our earlier discussions in this series, I noted that the commercial syndrome pursued comfort and convenience, rather than power or status, precisely because comfort and convenience were not seen to be zero sum games in that one person's advance didn't automatically translate into another person's loss. But what if pursuit of comfort and convenience is also a zero sum game (in many/most, if not all respects) in that one person's gain is that <i>same person's</i> loss? And if so, does this persistent negative externality call into question the value of the entire syndrome?Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com13http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2014/05/110-great-expectations-implacable.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-2041102654689109472013-06-28T09:52:00.001-07:002013-06-28T09:52:48.953-07:00109. Wells, Hitler and the World StateNote: This post is the one hundred and ninth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />I'm still generally not posting to the blog, but I came across something this morning (via Paul Krugman) which was too on topic not to mention, an <a href="http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/wells/english/e_whws" target="_blank">essay</a> by George Orwell about H.G. Wells and Hitler. Orwell contrasts the world of emotions to the world of objective science in terms that will be familiar to anyone who has read Systems of Survival or this series of posts.<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"What has Wells to set against [Hitler]? The usual rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey Declaration, which is an attempted definition of fundamental human rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is now especially concerned with federal world control of air power, it is the same gospel as he has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty years, always with an air of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so obvious.<br /><br /> ...<br /><br />Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood. Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to ‘enlightened’ and hedonistic people. What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the S.S. men patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the ‘sacred soil of the Fatherland’, etc. etc.), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered from. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action."</blockquote>&nbsp;...<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Mr. Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life, symbolised in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses. The principal villain of his <i>Outline of History</i> is the military adventurer, Napoleon. If one looks through nearly any book that he has written in the last forty years one finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses." </blockquote><br />I don't have much to add, the description of the commercial man of reason and progress vs. the guardian minded military man of god and country doesn't get much clearer. Orwell goes on to note the problems (systemic corruption, Jane Jacobs would have called it) that results when the tools of rationalism and progress (e.g. airplanes) are put into use by guardians for the purpose of warfare.<br /><br />One thing I found interesting is that even though Orwell discounts Wells' 'optimism' about a rational future run by rational men in the near term, due to the presence of Hitler on the world stage, he seems to readily admit that, sooner or later, Wells' rational one world government will come to pass.&nbsp; Looking at things now, some 70 years later, I find myself wondering instead if we have passed the highwater mark for rational men running a rational government along the lines envisioned by Wells and are now slowly turning in the opposite direction. <br /><br />Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com12http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2013/06/109-wells-hitler-and-world-state.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-37691414633442829822012-12-06T18:05:00.000-08:002012-12-06T18:05:20.848-08:00108. Debt, The First 5,000 YearsNote: This post is the one hundred and eighth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />Well, that was a slightly longer break than I planned, and I can't really promise a return to regular posting, but at any rate, this week's topic is the book, "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years">Debt: The First 5,000 Years</a>' by David Graeber. I was expecting this book to be interesting, but not too relevant to this series of posts, but I was quite wrong about that, as Graeber spends as much or more time talking about ethics as he does talking about money and debt (generally he talks about the two topics together).<br /><br />In fact, Graeber argues that our current society is so dominated by the morality and logic of exchange that we don't can't even talk about morality without using the language of exchange.<br /><br />One drawback of the book is that it is not particularly orderly, with Graeber wandering from topic to topic without offering much in the way of summaries or argument structure - so this post will likely suffer from the same deficiencies.<br /><br />Early on (page 29), Graeber makes the point that barter is a form of economic transaction that is used between strangers and/or enemies, not amongst people who know each other well who would typically either share or use gifts instead of bargaining and negotiating to decide who gets what.&nbsp; Later (page 68), Graeber notes that a commercial transaction (exchange) imply both separation and equality. On page 81, Graeber characterizes the 20th century as a situation where,<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other side is the logic of the state, where we all being with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today."</blockquote><br /><br />In the fifth chapter of the book, 'The Moral Grounds of Economic Relations, Graeber talks about the different moral systems we have for regulating economic activity, <br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Anthropology has shown just how different and numerous are the ways in which humans have been known to organize themselves. But it also reveals some remarkable commonalities - fundamental moral principles that appear to exist everywhere, and that will always tend to be invoked, wherever people transfer objects back and forth or argue about what other people owe them.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />One of the reasons that human life is so complicated, in turn, is because many of these principles contradict one another. ... The moral logic of exchange, and hence of debt, is only one; in any given situation, there are likely to be completely different principles that could be brought to bear. ...moral thought is founded on this very tension."</blockquote><br />Graeber continues on to argue that we have 3 different ways of relating to each other, and that exchange is just one of these three ways.&nbsp; The other two ways described by Graeber are Communism and Hierarchy.<br /> <br /><br />Graeber describes communism as the 'default' mode of interaction, in which, for example, if two people are working on a car and one asks the other to hand him a wrench, the other person won't ask what they are getting in return. Graeber notes that even in clearly commercial contexts, such as a local store, there is a tendency towards a communistic approach in which what people are expected to pay depends on their means. He notes that this is why shopkeepers in poor neighbourhoods are almost always from a non-local ethnic group. Someone local would face too much pressure to cut prices for their poor customers who are also their neighbours.<br /><br />After communism, Graeber discuss exchange, noting that , "what marks commercial exchange is that it's 'impersonal.'" Graeber notes that commercial relations are impermanent and can be broken off at any time, and whether in a bargaining session where both parties are trying to pay each other as little as possible or in a gift-exchange where both parties are trying to outdo one another in generosity, people feel a need to maintain equality.&nbsp; <br /><br />Next, Graeber describes hierarchy as a system where adherence to custom and tradition is the primary virtue and this appeal to custom is used to justify the use of force in maintaining a hierarchical social structure. The pattern of custom also takes precedence over any notion of reciprocity, "If you give some coins to a panhandler,&nbsp; and that panhandler recognizes you later, it is unlikely that he will give you any money - but he well consider you more likely to give him money again."<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"This is what I mean when I say that hierarchy operates by a principle that is the very opposite of reciprocity. Whenever the lines of superiority and inferiority are clearly drawn and accepted by all parties as the framework of a relationship, and relations are sufficiently ongoing that we are no longer simply dealing with arbitrary force, then relations will be seen as being regulated by a web of habit or customer."</blockquote><br />After describing the three different modes, Graeber notes that these modes always co-exist, "We are all communists with our closest friends and feudal lords when dealing with small children."<br /><br />----<br /><br />Later, Graeber devotes a chapter to the slippery concept of 'Honour'.&nbsp; Jane Jacobs classified 'Treasure Honour' as a guardian virtue in 'Systems of Survival' but Graeber sees two sides to honour, "to this day, 'honour' has two contradictory meanings. On the one hand we can speak of honour as simple integrity. Decent people honour their commitments ... to be an honourable man meant to be one who speaks the truth, obeys the law, keeps his promises, is fair and conscientious in commercial dealings ... [but] honour simultaneously meant something else, which had everything to do with ...violence"<br /><br />Although Graeber sees honour as existing in both a commercial and a guardian sense, he repeatedly notes how violent (guardian-minded)&nbsp; men are particularly obsessed with honour.<br /><br />Graeber describes an Irish system of honour in which "one's honour was the esteem one had in the eyes of others, one's honesty integrity and character, but also one's power, in the sense of the ability to protect oneseld, and one's family and followers, from any sort of degradation or insult." This system was strictly hierarchical with greater honour assigned to people of higher rank. <br /><br />In a key passage, Graeber notes the Irish system seems strange because they precisely quantified the 'price' of honour (it took 21 cows to pay for insulting the king's honour, fewer if you insulted someone of lower rank).<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"What makes Medieval Irish laws seem so peculiar from our perspective is that their exponents had not the slightest discomfort with putting an exact monetary price on human dignity. For us, the notion that the sanctity of a priest or the majesty of a king could be held equivalent to a million fried eggs or a hundred thousand haircuts is simply bizarre. These are precisely the things that ought to be considered beyond all possibility of quantification. If Medieval Irish juries felt otherwise, it was because people at that time did not use money to buy eggs or haircuts. It was the fact that it was still a human economy, in which money was used for social purposes, that it was possible to create such an intricate system whereby it was possible not just to mesaure but to add and subtract specific quantities of human dignity - and in doing so, provide us with a unique window into the true nature of honour itself.<br /><br /><br />The obvious question is: What happens to such an economy when people do begin to use the same money used to measure measure dignity to buy eggs and haircuts? As the history of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean world reveals, the result was a profound - and enduring - moral crisis." </blockquote><br /><br />Further on (page 260), Graeber notes the historical success of China resulting from maintaining a clear line of separation between the hierarchical and commercial spheres,<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be largely driven by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people; but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world - even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820's"</blockquote>For the thesis of Jane Jacob's 'Systems of Survival', the most challenging aspect of "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" is that Graeber sees medieval/enlightenment Europe as a place where there was a lot of mixing of Commercial and Guardian roles (on page 346 he refers to the 'familiar but particularly European entanglement of war and commerce"), which according to Jane Jacobs, should lead only to corruption and suffering, but instead, as Graeber notes, the countries of medieval Europe eventually attained the world's highest standards of living. Graeber dwells on the negatives caused by this mixture, the slave trade and all the ills of colonialism, but the fact remains that it was Europe that developed the means to impose their will on the rest of the world through the development of new technology and social forms of organization.<br /><br />Leaving this challenge aside for now, the main thrust of Graeber's work seems to be the harm caused by the notion of debt when it crosses the boundaries of moral systems. If a commercial debt is just a commercial debt, then if a business venture fails, you declare bankruptcy and move on. If a debt is non-commercial in nature, then it is governed by human relations that take into account the relative status and ability to pay of the people involved. When commercial debts become treated as debts of honour, then people are forced to do anything to pay, no matter how horrific or unpleasant. For example, Graeber describes the depredations of Spanish soldiers in Central America as driven by their own need to pay debts back home.<br /><br /><br />This distinction between commercial debts and non-commercial ones is perhaps most noticeable in the sheer number of times that Graeber refers to some historical debt forgiveness scheme that was implemented for all debts except commercial debts.To take just a few examples:<br />Page 256, "where earlier codes had established a 15-percemt annual rate of interest, with exceptions for commercial loans..." <br /><br />Page 290, "the revival of Roman law ... put new weapons in the hands of those who wished to argue that, at least in the case of commercial loans, usury laws should be relaxed"<br /><br />Page 390, "It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt"<br /><br />Digging around on the internet, it seems I'm not the only person who <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/25/too-big-to-fail-the-first-5000-years/">noticed</a> this. Here's a quote from a post by Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"The argument I found myself having again and again related to this particular point – on more than one occasion during the history of debt, it was noted almost parenthetically that a particular debt reform was carried out on the basis “except commercial debts”, and I found myself saying “No! Hang on! Tell me more about these exceptions!”.<br /><br />And I think this because commercial debts between merchants are a really important part of the story here.<br /><br />..<br /><br />In general in the commercial world, the ability to put yourself in debt is a privilege, not an obligation – one of the most important aspects of corporate legal personhood, as an introductory legal textbook will tell you, is not the right to sue other people, but the right to be sued. If you can be sued, then you can enter into agreements with other people that they have confidence that the courts will enforce.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Although the parallel track of debt as obligation, religion and morality has certainly been there, and is described expertly in the book, from day one it has been recognised among merchants and men of commerce that the point of the debt relation is to serve the organisation and arrangement of commercial need."</blockquote><br />&nbsp;-<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Debt as per Graeber’s book is an example of this – the debt contract is basically a tool of industrial organisation that escaped from the laboratory and ran wild.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Having said that, there are some situations where Graeber’s analysis seems completely accurate. Countries don’t have bankruptcy codes governing them, and so in the sphere of international debt negotiations, one can see all the pernicious aspects of the “folk-economics” version of the debt contract that Graeber describes. Looking at the relationship between the European Union and Greece, or even Ireland, one can see that the debt relation is being specifically shaped into a tool for exercising power in a way which would not have been possible through democratic means.<br /><br />...<br /><br />...it’s a very salutary reminder of what happens when people forget that debt is really only (or really only ought to be) the legal system’s best guess at what kind of arrangements would best serve the general purposes of commerce. It is, as Graeber intimates, when the debt relation takes on an independent life of its own that the problems all start."</blockquote><br /><br />---<br />As Davies notes, aside from providing a supporting voice to the notion of economic relations being governed by Guardian or Commercial (or Communistic) values, and aside from enumerating the many ways in which societies throughout history have separated commerce from governance and violence, Graeber ultimately makes the argument that debt in particular is a human relation that needs to be carefully regulated so that we do not mistake commercial debts for moral debts.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com13http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2012/12/108-debt-first-5000-years.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-22103736242339510572012-06-27T19:43:00.000-07:002012-06-27T21:54:04.142-07:00107. The Righteous Mind, Part 4Note: This post is the one hundred and seventh in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />This week the topic is the book, "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all">The Righteous Mind</a>" by Jonathan Haidt. Having read the book, I highly recommend the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all">NY Times review</a> of it as an excellent summary.<br /><br />Note that we have encountered the work of Jonathan Haidt before, albeit indirectly, in <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2009/11/28-moral-realism.html">this earlier post</a> which discussed an essay by Steven Pinker, which was written as a reaction to Haidt's work.<br /><br />Today's post covers the third of Haidt's three main arguments, that people are 90% chimp and 10% bee, meaning that people are a mix of self-interested and group-interested.<br /><br />In this section of the book, Haidt eventually defines 'moral systems' as,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible."</blockquote><br />This definition follows a lengthy argument by Haidt trying to justify the notion that people could have evolved to be cooperative in nature (10% bee), which he no doubt felt was necessary because this is a controversial position to take in the current academic environment. But I didn't need any convincing on that score, so I'm not going to dwell on that aspect of this section of the book.<br /><br />Instead, let's look more closely at the definition of moral systems spelled out by Haidt.<br /><br />The first point to make is that it seems a bit narrow, in denyng the possible existence of morality outside of a social context. I tend to agree more with Francis Fukuyama, who, if we recall from <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2009/06/17-trust-social-virtues-and-creation-of.html">an earlier post</a> in the series, stated that,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"The capacity for hard work, frugality, rationality, innovativeness, and openness to risk are all entrepreneurial virtues that apply to individuals and could be exercised by Robinson Crusoe on his proverbial desert island. But there is also a set of social virtues, like honesty, reliability, cooperativeness and a sense of duty to others, that are essentially social in nature." </blockquote>More recently, <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2011/09/97-guardian-syndrome-derangement.html">we saw</a> that Ayn Rand spokesman John Galt made the point even more clearly,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island - it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim ... that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today - and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves." </blockquote>Ayn Rand, in a point echoed more recently by <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2009/04/9-efficient-society-part-3.html">Joseph Heath</a>, emphasized further that there are situations (e.g. corporations that might mutually benefit from cooperative price-fixing) where the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of cooperative behaviour is the best course of action. True, Haidt might argue that this falls under the 'regulation' of self-interest, but it doesn't seem like this sort of thing is what he had in mind.<br /><br />More generally, Haidt suggests the existence of moral systems, denies that he is a moral relativist who believes that all moral systems are equally valid, and identifies two distinct moral casts of mind present in the population ("WEIRD" and "Normal") but he never makes any sort of attempt to categorize what sort of moral systems might exist or what might make one moral system superior to another.<br /><br />This is not really criticism, Haidt has already covered a lot of ground, it's just that he went quite far, but mostly stopped short of addressing the questions I've been pursuing in this series. Why do some moral systems apply in some contexts and not others, what makes one moral system superior to another, etc.<br /><br />Haidt spends a chapter explaining his viewpoint (which I mostly share) that religion may be wrong (supernaturally speaking) but is nevertheless useful (here on earth) because it helps bind communities together and support cooperative efforts (such as feeding the poor or inquisiting heretics). Throughout the third section of the book he emphasizes that our groupish behaviour typically applies only to whichever group we identify with, not with the human race as a whole, but that experimental results have shown as people become more groupish in a situation, the increased love for the in-group outweighs any increased hate for&nbsp; out-groups.<br /><br />Haidt briefly (page 266) seems to suggest that religion is beneficial to trade, "In the medieval world, Jews and Muslims excelled in long-distance trade in part because their religions helped them create trustworthy relationships and enforceable contracts." However, he doesn't go on to note that Christians were certainly quite religious during the medieval period as well, or that in modern times, the nations with the highest standard of living tend to be the least religious. Similarly, he doesn't spend any time on the relationship between religion and scientific inquiry. Coming from an Irish background, I can see that religion supports social cohesion, but I might take some convincing that greater religiosity coincides with greater commercial trade.<br /><br />---<br /><br />Putting the three different sections of the book together, Haidt has presented three reasons why we struggle to agree on what is right: 1) We have instinctive moral reactions to situations that we rationalize, rather than coming to a rational conclusion based on disinterested reasoning, 2) different people have different sets of moral instincts, and 3) by our nature we are tribal, in the sense that we define ourselves and choose our actions based on the groups that we belong to, not just on our individual situation.<br /><br />Earlier on in the book, Haidt suggested that rather than aiming for some grand rational argument that would teach us how to all act morally (as he thought Plato was engaged in in The Republic) we should instead try to design society in such a manner that we would naturally behave in a moral manner (which is what Plato actually was engaged in in The Republic). But where Plato set out an elaborate scheme for disentangling two sets of people to follow two distinct moral systems, according to their nature, Haidt has little to offer beyond suggesting that U.S. congressman should bring their families with them to Washington rather than leaving them at home, so that there is more socializing across party lines. But despite the lack of solutions offerred it's an interesting book that just might change the way you think about how you think so it's worth a read.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com10http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2012/06/107-righteous-mind-part-4.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-11505847804689947252012-06-13T20:22:00.000-07:002012-06-13T20:22:00.103-07:00106. The Righteous Mind - Part 3Note: This post is the one hundred and sixth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />This week the topic is the book, "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all">The Righteous Mind</a>" by Jonathan Haidt. Having read the book, I highly recommend the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all">NY Times review</a> of it as an excellent summary.<br /><br />Note that we have encountered the work of Jonathan Haidt before, albeit indirectly, in <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2009/11/28-moral-realism.html">this earlier post</a> which discussed an essay by Steven Pinker, which was written as a reaction to Haidt's work.<br /><br />Today's post covers the second of Haidt's three main arguments, that:<br /><br />a) There are (at least) 6 dimensions to human morality: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Freedom/Oppression, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion and Sanctity/Degradation. <br /><br />and <br /><br />b) "liberals" (in an American sense, think the Democratic party) are only concerned with Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating and Freedom/Oppression whereas conservatives (think Republicans) are concerned with all 6 moral dimensions.<br /><br />----<br />Let's start by giving a little more detail on each of the 6 dimensions that Haidt identifies. Note that in each case, Haidt offers an explanation of how this moral value might have provided an evolutionary advantage, and notes that although the original evolutionary value may no longer be valid, the moral value can still be triggered in modern circumstances and may have value in modern society.<br /><br /><u>Care/Harm</u><br /><br /><blockquote>"If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one<br />Drying in the color of the evening sun<br />Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away<br />But something in our minds will always stay<br /><br />Perhaps this final act was meant<br />To clinch a lifetime's argument<br />That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could"<br /><br />- Sting, "Fragile"</blockquote><br />"Nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could" is a pretty fair statement of the Harm principle that Haidt describes. In Haidt's view, the evolutionary requirement to take care of our vulnerable children gives a desire to protect people from harm, and that our assessment that something is 'cute' is linked to this assessment of how much protection from harm someone (or some animal) needs.<br /><br />--<br /><u>Fairness/Cheating</u><br /><blockquote>"And now you're back from outer space<br />I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face<br />I should have changed that stupid lock<br />I should have made you leave your key<br />If I'd've known for just one second you'd back to bother me<br />Go on now, go walk out the door<br />Just turn around now<br />('Cause) you're not welcome anymore<br />Weren't you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye?<br />...<br />And so you felt like droppin' in<br />And just expect me to be free,<br />Now I'm savin' all my lovin' for someone who's lovin' me<br />Go on now..."<br /><br />- Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive"</blockquote><br />Haidt sees our desire for things to be fair as being necessary to secure cooperation without falling prey to cheaters. He relates the results of an experiment in which people could work together to increase their total payout by contributing to a public pool of funds, but where people could free-ride by not contributing to the public pool but still receiving their share of the public money. <br /><br />In the experiment, people's willingness to contribute declines over time as they see free-riders taking advantage of their contributions. But when the experiment was modified to allow people to spend their own money to punish people who free-ride, people were more than willing to do so, and high levels of contributions to the public pool were sustained over time.<br /><br />The willingness to take vengeance on people who try to take advantage of us, even when it costs us to take that vengeance, is necessary to sustain cooperation in the face of those who would try to take advantage of cooperative efforts.<br /><br />In the song above, even if the singer might still be in love with her former lover, she knows that she needs to punish him for his past transgressions and that the long term goal of not being taken advantage of supersedes a short term desire for reconciliation.<br /><br />In Haidt's view, conservatives focus more on ensuring that cheaters are punished, whereas liberals focus more on ensuring that people don't get cheated.<br /><br />---<br /><u>Freedom/Oppression</u><br /><blockquote>"Here comes the helicopter, second time today<br />Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away<br />How many kids they've murdered only God can say<br />If I had a rocket launcher...I'd make somebody pay"<br /><br />- Bruce Cockburn, "If I Had A Rocket Launcher"</blockquote><br />Like Sting in the quote above, Bruce Cockburn was writing in response to Central American violence during the 1980's, but Bruce Cockburn drew a different conclusion. Cockburn decided that fighting back was a better approach than turning the other cheek (interestingly, they both followed the same template in writing about Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, with Sting's 'They Dance Alone' suggesting the regime will fall when it runs out of money, while Bruce Cokburn's 'Santiago Dawn' invokes an armed rebellion with military thugs under attack, doors broken down, rocks flying and barricades in flames). <br /><br />Arguably, I could have filed this lyric under 'Fairness/Cheating' as well, since Cockburn is suggesting that the government should 'pay' for what it has done, but the reaction here is not to being cheated, but rather to being bullied and oppressed, and it is that opposition to bullying and oppression (in Haidt's view, the force that makes human hunter/gatherer societies egalitarian in nature) which is what Haidt is getting at with the Freedom/Oppression moral value.<br /><br />----<br /><u>Loyalty/Betrayal</u><br /><br /><blockquote>"Police arrive -- muddy up the floor<br />Dig out half the plaster -- it's a .38 for sure<br />Kick the neighbour's door in<br />Saying better tell it all<br />Who put that bullet hole in Peggy's kitchen wall?<br /><br />Blaster on the back porch, shaking up the lane<br />They're drinking gin and joking -- laughter falling down like rain<br />Everybody wears a halo<br />Never saw nothing at all<br />So who put that bullet hole in Peggy's kitchen wall?"<br /><br />- Bruce Cockburn, "Peggy's Kitchen Wall"</blockquote><br />As we've seen in our extensive discussions of the Prisoner's Dilemma in this series, people who are willing to work together, even in a case where they would individually be better off betraying each other, can reap a collective benefit from this show of loyalty.<br /><br />Haidt focusses more on 'big' loyalty, to a country, to a sporting team, than on 'small' loyalty (e.g. a group of people who agree not to tell the police who put a bullet hole in someone's wall) but the principle is the same. Haidt takes it as self-evident that a group with loyalty will have an evolutionary advantage over one that doesn't but, although I certainly agree, it would have been interesting if he had made the case (for example, a tribe of people who gather berries wouldn't seem to get much benefit from cooperation as compared to a tribe of hunters, a tribe with warlike neighbours might get benefits from loyalty that a tribe with no neighbours would not, etc.)<br /><br />----<br /><u>Authority/Subversion</u><br /><blockquote>"Got in a little hometown jam<br />So they put a rifle in my hand<br />Sent me off to a foreign land<br />To go and kill the yellow man<br /><br />Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A.<br />I was born in the U.S.A., born in the U.S.A.<br /><br />Come back home to the refinery<br />Hiring man said, "Son if it was up to me"<br />Went down to see my V.A. man<br />He said, "Son, don't you understand"<br /><br />- Bruce Springsteen, "Born in the U.S.A."</blockquote><br />At first, I couldn't think of any songs that invoked Haidt's notion of respect for authority (other than maybe 'Church of the Holy Spook', by Shane MacGowan)<br /><br />But then I realized I should be looking for songs protesting the violation of this precept, not songs praising it directly. Why is Bruce Springsteen's protagonist so insistent that he was, 'Born in the U.S.A.'? - because he believes that he has fulfilled his part of the bargain, going off to fight for his country, but his superiors have neglected their side, leaving him unemployed and without prospects upon his return home. The moral value of Authority/Subversion that Haidt refers to is a two-way street, in Haidt's words, 'people who relate to each other in this way have mutual expectations that are more like those of a parent and child than those of a dictator and fearful underlings.' We see this in the song, which is a cry for a mutual expectation that has been betrayed.<br /><br />Again, Haidt seems to take it as self-evident that support for a hierarchical structure will convey some sort of evolutionary advantage to groups that adopt it although he does not really specify what the benefit is (economies of scale? ability to cooperate across groups too large to bond with just loyalty? ability to distribute proceeds of cooperation without conflict?).<br /><br />----<br /><u>Sanctity/Degradation</u><br /><br /><blockquote>"In this cold commodity culture<br />Where you lay your money down<br />It's hard to even notice<br />That all this earth is hallowed ground"<br /><br />- Bruce Cockburn, "The Gift"</blockquote><br />The final moral value that Haidt identifies, 'Sanctity' seems the least useful at first glance. Haidt figures that this moral value was useful for helping us avoid poisons (like vegetables :) and activities that might carry disease or other harmful qualities.<br /><br />He argues that, in a modern context, when we have science to tell us what is dangerous to eat or touch, this moral value is used to bind people together by allowing them to rally around some sacred item. To be honest, I didn't find this explanation particularly convincing, although I do think that this moral value can still be useful. <br /><br />As the song lyrics above suggests, I think this moral value may lie behind what Jane Jacobs characterized as an almost inexplicable disdain for commercial activity that has existed throughout much of our history. In a modern context where the moral disdain for commercial activity has lessened, this value might still help us to see where certain things should not be for sale (body parts, votes, endangered species etc.) Of course, by the same token, it's likely this same value that propels the war on drugs and prevents legalization of, for example, marijuana.<br /><br /><br />--------<br />So that covers the 6 moral values that Haidt has identified to date. Let's talk about Haidt's second main argument in this section of the book, that there is a distinct difference between liberals / 'WEIRD' - W(estern) E(ducated) I(ndustrialized) R(ich) D(emocratic) people, who only place value on 3 moral dimensions (Care/Harm, Fairness, and Freedom/Oppression) and who mostly follow a 'no harm, no foul' morality, and conservatives who place value on all 6 moral dimensions.<br /><br />There was <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/offbeat/story/2012/06/04/offbeat-dead-cat-helicopter-artist.html">a story</a> on the CBC website the other day about a Dutch man who, after his cat had died in an accident, decided to turn his cat into a flying helicopter (see the video at <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/offbeat/story/2012/06/04/offbeat-dead-cat-helicopter-artist.html">the link</a>). There were a number of comments on the story that were popular and uncontroversial (meaning few people clicked 'dislike' on the comment) and these comments were all some sort of humourous commentary on the story. But there were also a number of comments that were both popular and controversial (many dislikes) and these comments were along the lines of:<br /><br /><blockquote>"sick" </blockquote><br /><blockquote>"Gross!!!! How disgusting...." </blockquote><br /><blockquote>"I find this disturbing and disrespectful. Whenever one of my pets has passed away, I've grieved. I believe that's a normal, sane response to losing a furry family member. Never would it occur to me to turn my pet into flying 'art'. *shudder*</blockquote>" <br /><br /><blockquote>"Being a former cat owner, having lost our guy who was 16 years of age, I find this completely disgusting and very disrespectful to the cat."</blockquote><br />Invariably, comments on the disgusting, gross, disrespectful or profane nature of the dead flying cat were met with a rebuttal indicating that it was no big deal because the cat was already dead, and thus no harm was done. The last comment I quoted above provoked responses that flesh out the details of the argument in full.<br /><br />The first response is, <blockquote>"Then don't do this with your dead cat, and let this person be."<br /></blockquote>To which the response comes back, <blockquote>"No Tyler, sugarpei is right, what this guy has done is sick. Had it been a human, he would had been arrested for causing an indignity to a corpse. This is no different."</blockquote><br />In reply, <blockquote>"... Its not up to us to judge this guy. The cat isn't getting hurt or suffering from this.<br /><br />To repeat; cats are not equal to humans, and what someone does with the remains of their pet is up to them."</blockquote><br /><br /><br />In general, there seemed to be widespread agreement that more than the principle of harm was at stake because there was general agreement that it would be wrong to do this with a human corpse, even though there would be no 'harm' done since the person was already dead. In addition, there was general agreement that it would be wrong to kill a cat just for this purpose because that would harm the cat. But where there was less agreement was on the point of whether the same moral value that prevents us from desecrating a human corpse should also apply to a cat. It wasn't clear to me reading the comments that anyone made the argument why cats should be protected from harm, like humans are, but not protected from degradation like humans are.<br />----<br /><br />Haidt surveyed 12 groups of people from around the world and found that one group, comprised of people attending the University of Pennsylvania, was different from the rest, in that the participants resembled the folks in the comment thread on the dead cat who saw nothing morally wrong as long as no harm was done. The other groups were more willing to morally condemn actions even where no harm was caused. Haidt has found that the distinction between the two ways of seeing the world mostly came down to culture and class, with upper middle class people from Western countries ('WEIRD' people) showing the strongest tendency toward a 'Harm-based' morality system, and Americans being the strongest outlier in that direction even within the Western world.<br /><br />Haidt argues that this flows from a upper/middle class Western world view premised around the notion of autonomous individuals vs. the rest of the worldview which is centred around relationships.<br /><br />Unfortunately, Haidt seems mostly uninterested in why this might be the case. He does make a passing reference (page 122) that 'The virtues taught to children in a warrior culture are different from those taught in a farming culture or a modern industrialized culture' but he doesn't seem too interested in what those differences might be or why they might vary.<br /><br />Over and over again, Haidt makes passing reference to ways that people's moral values have changed over time, almost always suggesting that they have become more 'liberal' or harm-focussed. <br /><br />For example, on page 120, "As Western societies became more educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, the minds of its intellectuals changed. They became more analytic and less holistic." or page 124, "in the past fifty years people in many Western societies have come to feel compassion in response to many more kinds of animal suffering, and they've come to feel disgust in response to many fewer kinds of sexual activity" or page 142, "Until recently, Americans addressed strangers and superiors using title plus last name"<br /> <br />In all of these cases, the trend described by Haidt is towards a more liberal, harm-centred viewpoint. And at every instance I felt the urge to write in the margin of my copy of the book, 'Why?' but Haidt never goes into why.<br /><br />It's a bit funny because in the latter part of this section of the book, Haidt argues that American liberals are at a disadvantage because conservative politicians make arguments that invoke all 6 moral values, while liberal politicians invoke only 2 or 3. But it doesn't seem to add up that the most liberal place is getting more liberal over time and that somehow this has started to become a problem for liberal politicians in the last few decades. Clearly there is more going on here than is covered by Haidt.<br /><br /><br />Of course, the whole point of this series of posts is to discuss Jane Jacobs' 'Systems of Survival' so I must point out that the 'WEIRD' morality that Haidt refers to sounds a lot like the commercial syndrome. Hierarchy, loyalty and prowess are all discounted, while shunning fraud and force (which would cause harm) and being honest (fairness, no cheating) take precedence. Haidt never references the 'solo' virtues that can be practiced without the presence of other people (thrift, innovation, hard-work, etc.) but as we'll see in the next post, Haidt eventually defines morality in the context of social cooperation, so this oversight in understandable.<br /><br />Meanwhile on the conservative side (the non-Weird part of the world in Haidt's view), we have respect for hierarchy, obedience, loyalty, respect for tradition and taking vengeance, all good guardian virtues, per Jacobs.<br /><br />Furthermore, Haidt identifies the commercial syndrome morality as being most prevalent among the wealthier parts of societies descended from what Weber described as 'The Spirit of Capitalism.'<br /><br />Like so many others, Haidt never considers the possibility that morality might be context-sensitive, not just in the sense that some morals might be more useful than others in certain cultures (which he does acknowledge) but that even within one culture some actions might be moral or immoral depending on the context.<br /><br />However, given that Haidt's main focus seems to be to get people who have a 'WEIRD' morality system to appreciate the value of recognizing all 6 virtues (i.e. to get people with a commercial cast of mind to appreciate the guardian cast of mind), and that the focus of his book ends up being two of the main guardian aspects of our society (The subtitle of the book is, "Why Good People are Divided by <i>Politics</i> and <i>Religion</i>") it seems that he may realize this unconsciously, even though it hasn't made its way into his writing yet.<br /><br />----<br />Afterthought 1: In Haidt's view, U.S. politics involves a harm-focussed, commercially minded left (the Democratic party) matched by a guardian minded conservative right (the Republican party), and from this he concludes that the harm-focussed morality is a left-wing morality. But I think his findings rather speak to the absence of a Guardian minded left party in U.S. politics, akin to the NDP in Canada or the Labour party in Britain. On reflection, it does seem that the Canadian system is more like a liberal centre with two guardian minded wings, whereas the U.S. system lacks political representation for guardian minded people with left wing politics. <br /><br />Perhaps I am just generalizing from my own example, where Haidt's survey showed my moral compass aligning with a Conservative worldview in which almost all the moral dimensions identified by Haidt are valued, but yet you won't find me voting for the Conservative party in Canada any time soon. With that in mind, I took many of the song lyrics describing a conservative/non-WEIRD/guardian view of the world from Bruce Cockburn, a left-wing Canadian musician.<br /><br />----<br />Afterthought #2, here's <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/06/04/f-handler-liberal-conservative-haidt.html">another CBC article</a>, that one outlying Haidt's views, the article itself isn't particularly useful, but the comments are mostly spot-on, in my opinion, and worth reading.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com8http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2012/06/106-righteous-mind-part-3.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-57812854551768811702012-05-31T22:25:00.000-07:002012-05-31T22:25:33.861-07:00Rare GemThe Globe and Mail is pretty pathetic these days (and not in a <i>sym</i>pathetic way), but <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/celebrity-photos/celebrity-photos-of-the-week-may-30/article2446691/">this</a> is pretty awesome.<br /><br />Yon don't often see this:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_eLwtmQgVrg/T8hR-vqoUSI/AAAAAAAAAtY/k5udHQYDDi8/s1600/cannes-hilton2__1411173cl-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="257" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_eLwtmQgVrg/T8hR-vqoUSI/AAAAAAAAAtY/k5udHQYDDi8/s400/cannes-hilton2__1411173cl-5.jpg" /></a></div><br />"Paris Hilton wears a slitty gown at amfAR's Cinema Against AIDS event during the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, last week."<br /><br />...preceded by this:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ayuHnxTp5c0/T8hRmOzWgtI/AAAAAAAAAtM/ky3nMVJNHJs/s1600/protest5_JPG_1411172cl-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="257" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ayuHnxTp5c0/T8hRmOzWgtI/AAAAAAAAAtM/ky3nMVJNHJs/s400/protest5_JPG_1411172cl-5.jpg" /></a></div><br />"Thousands of Quebec students march through Montreal to protest university tuition fee hikes. Oh wait. Sorry about that, English Canada. You didn't come here to look at a bunch of self-centred, entitled people who don't know the value of a dollar and obviously crave attention. I don't know what I was thinking. You have no time for those kind of people."<br /><br />More at the <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/celebrity-photos/celebrity-photos-of-the-week-may-30/article2446691/">link</a>.<br />Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com12http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2012/05/rare-gem.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-71776367431105271682012-05-30T19:21:00.000-07:002012-05-30T19:21:00.633-07:00105. The Righteous Mind - Part 2Note: This post is the one hundred and fifth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />This week the topic is the book, "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all">The Righteous Mind</a>" by Jonathan Haidt. Having read the book, I highly recommend the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all">NY Times review</a> of it as an excellent summary.<br /><br />Note that we have encountered the work of Jonathan Haidt before, albeit indirectly, in <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2009/11/28-moral-realism.html">this earlier post</a> which discussed an essay by Steven Pinker, which was written as a reaction to Haidt's work.<br /><br />Today's post covers the first of Haidt's three main arguments, that:<br /><br />1) People don't make rational decisions to decide what is moral, but instead have instinctive reactions regarding morality and then rationalize their instinctive reaction after the fact. Haidt likens the rational, conscious part of the brain to a rider sitting on an elephant (the part of the brain which makes the instinctive moral judgement) and argues that the rider has little control. <br /><br />In fact, Haidt argues that the primary function of the ration part of the brain is not to conduct dispassionate analysis, but rather to come up with reasons to support whatever instinctive judgment the elephant (the intuitive part of the brain) has already come up with. Haidt recounts a number of experiments which support his thesis, including one where people were hypnotized to have negative associations with certain words, and then read passages describing moral violations some of which included the code word and some that didn't. The researchers found that passages containing negative code words lead to stronger negative reactions from the readers. To their surprise, even a story which didn't describe any moral transgression at all, and simply said either that, "Dad tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students in order to stimulate discussion, or the same thing but worded so that "Dan often picks topics" found that in a third of respondents, inclusion of a negative code word lead them to morally condemn Dan. The researchers had asked people to explain their reaction and those who reacted negatively to Dan said things like, "Dan is a popularity seeking snob' or "I don't know, it just seems like he's up to something."<br /><br />Haidt argues that the intuitive part of our brain is always active, instantly judging everything and everyone we come across as favourable or unfavourable, and then the 'rational' part of our brain steps in to provide reasonable sounding arguments to support this position. In one study, (echoed in the news recently), researches found that people who were more intelligent were able to come up with more reasons to support whatever position they held, but greater intelligence did not help at all in coming up with reasons for the opposing point of view. In other words, being smarter just makes you better able to rationalize your own intuitive reactions, not better able to understand other opinions.<br /><br />Haidt figures that in evolution, it was more important for people to be able to maintain their social reputation (by explaining their actions, creating arguments to support their gut (intuitive) reactions and so on) than it was for them to come to accurate conclusions about what was true.<br /><br />Haidt does allow for some capacity of the rational part of the brain to do more than just support the intuitive part. He cites a study in which if people were forced to wait 2 minutes before responding to some stimulus, then they would be less likely to just go with the gut reaction and more likely to come to a reasoned conclusion. But mostly Haidt is pessimistic about the ability of the individual to question their own biases or challenge their own intuitive reactions and beliefs - he believes that we need other people to challenge us and that society needs a back and forth between people of different viewpoints in order for people to be exposed to multiple viewpoints and have a chance to update their opinions based on competing arguments rather than just constantly searching out more supporting evidence for what they already believe.<br /><br />In the last chapter of the first section of the book, Haidt has a list of bullet points summarizing the argument so far, that we care obsessively about our reputation, that conscious reasoning is like a press secretary that argues on our behalf, not a scientist searching for truth, and that reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion because we ask, 'can I believe it?' about things we want to believe and 'Must I believe it?" about things we don't.<br /><br />But I wanted to focus on his last bullet point which is as follows:<br /><br /><blockquote>"In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team."</blockquote><br />Atrios expresses this in characteristically pithy fashion, as "<a href="http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/05/its-tribal.html">It's tribal.</a>" an further notes that, "Policy preferences mostly aren't about narrow personal economic considerations, even for the rich."<br /><br />It's interesting that Haidt focused in on the political realm, home to the guardian syndrome, which is filled with interpersonal ethics such as 'be loyal' as compared to the commercial syndrome where the duty to other people is pretty much limited to not screwing them over (foregoing force and fraud). In this he is echoing some of the earlier works we have encountered such as <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2009/12/29-community-and-market-economy.html">Hans Ritschl,</a> <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2010/10/68-selfishness-altruism-and-rationality.html">Howard Margolis</a> and <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2011/10/98-republic-part-2.html">Plato</a>.<br /><br />Disappointingly, Haidt does not really delve into the question of how or why commercial activity or science might lack the groupishness or tribalness that is present in morality (as seen by Haidt) and in politics, or why politics in particular sees this tribal behaviour.<br /><br />Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2012/05/105-righteous-mind-part-2.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-5842064947649786172012-05-09T19:26:00.000-07:002012-05-09T19:26:00.448-07:00104. The Righteous Mind, Part 1Note: This post is the one hundred and fourth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />This week the topic is the book, "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all">The Righteous Mind</a>" by Jonathan Haidt. Having read the book, I highly recommend the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all">NY Times review</a> of it as an excellent summary.<br /><br />Note that we have encountered the work of Jonathan Haidt before, albeit indirectly, in <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2009/11/28-moral-realism.html">this earlier post</a> which discussed an essay by Steven Pinker, which was written as a reaction to Haidt's work.<br /><br />The Righteous Mind has three main arguments:<br /><br />1) People don't make rational decisions to decide what is moral, but instead have instinctive reactions regarding morality and then rationalize their instinctive reaction after the fact. Haidt likens the rational, conscious part of the brain to a rider sitting on an elephant (the part of the brain which makes the instinctive moral judgement) and argues that the rider has little control. <br /><br />2) Rather than seeing people as having no morality at all and being solely self-interested or even just having a moral system oriented solely around not doing harm or being unfair, Haidt argues that in addition to caring about care/harm and fairness/cheating, people also care about freedom/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Haidt compares these moral senses to tastebuds, and according to his studies, people that are "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) tend to to focus more on Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating and Freedom/Oppression, while Conservatives have a wider range of moral values (note: you can take Haidt's test here (registration required) - I tried it and scored higher than both the typical American liberal and the typical American Conservative on care, fairness, loyalty and authority, and lower than both on sanctity - even though I am Western, Educated, Rich and Democratic, perhaps my lack of exposure to Industrial workplaces made the difference :) <br /><br />3) That people are 90% chimp and 10% bee, meaning that people are a mix of self-interested and group-interested. I won't recount the old arguments about how on the one hand, being selfish helps individual genes reproduce while on the other hand cooperative groups can outcompete selfish ones, but Haidt offers lots of support for the notion that evolution offerred ample opportunity for humans to evolve a nature that is at least partly group-interested rather than being purely self-interested.<br /><br /><br />I do recommend Haidt's book, it is easy to read, entertaining, covers a lot of ground, and will change the way you interpret other people's (and perhaps your own) expression of opinions and moral views.<br /><br />Additionally, Haidt is well read, marshals lots of empirical evidence for his arguments, doesn't seem to be following a rigid ideological agenda and seems willing to consider new information and change his views accordingly.<br /><br />The next few posts will look at some of Haidt's arguments in a bit more detail and get into some of the areas where, in my opinion, there is some room for improvement in his thesis.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2012/05/104-righteous-mind-part-1.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-55986240764886950982012-04-25T21:47:00.000-07:002012-04-25T21:47:06.892-07:00InterludeNot a real post this week, but in lieu of that, I thought I'd pass along some<a href="http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2010/02/transcript-thom-hartmann-talks-chris-hedges-about-how-liberals-are-useless-lot-07-dec-0"> comments from Chris Hedges</a> that I came across the other day:<br /><blockquote>"Well, you know, the great political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in his book "Democracy Incorporated" calls the American system of government at this point inverted totalitarianism. And I think that’s a very prescient term. He argues that inverted totalitarianism unlike classical forms of totalitarianism doesn’t revolve around a demagog or a leader but finds it’s expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. So that under inverted totalitarianism you have corporate interests that purport to pay fealty to the constitution, to electoral politics, to democratic institutions while massively subverting or controlling the levers of power to annul the rights and desires of the citizenry so that in classical totalitarianism systems, both communism and fascism, politics always trumps economics. But <b>in an inverted totalitarianism economics trumps politics.</b>" (emphasis added)</blockquote><br /><br />Hedges is echoing my own previous comments regarding how much of the corruption we seeing our time is not from guardians introducing on the economic sector, but rather the other way around, with economic actors bending the state to their own self-interest.<br /><br />In <a href="http://www.mikaloneil.com/blog/seen-on-the-web/occupy-wall-st-chris-hedges-interview/">another interview</a>, Hedges touches on another aspect of the commercial syndrome which can run amuck when it is outside it's appropriate sphere: <blockquote>"Corporate systems are, in theological terms, and I'm a seminary graduate and can't escape it, are systems of death. They turn everything into a commodity. Human beings become commodities, the natural world becomes a commodity, that they exploit. Until exhaustion or collapse. In that sense, Karl Marx was right. It is a revolutionary force. The revolution has happened. They’ve won.<br /><br />To appeal to the systems of power, or the illusory systems of power that they place before us, is to essentially become complicitous in the radical reconfiguration that the corporate state intends. <b>They know no limits. The only word corporations understand is MORE.</b> They will push and push and push until human capital is destroyed, until the ecosystem itself is destroyed." (emphasis added)</blockquote><br />I don't really have anything to add, my point in quoting Hedges is simply to note another example of someone whose arguments unknowingly align with Jane Jacobs work in 'Systems of Survival' with Hedges criticizing the corruption of commercial actors intruding on the guardian sphere with respect to governance and for taking a 'no limits' approach toward human and natural systems which do (in Hedges' view) have limits. Note how Hedges, with his anti-commercial guardian mindset, comes from a background of being a seminary graduate (i.e. from the primarily guardian-minded world of organized religion).<br /><br />Note: Post updated to add <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/business/debt-collector-is-faulted-for-tough-tactics-in-hospitals.html?_r=2&hp">this link</a>, just to make the abstract point about commercial ethics overrunning their appropriate boundaries a little more concrete.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2012/04/interlude.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-89573532557559172742012-04-18T20:37:00.001-07:002012-04-29T17:03:48.131-07:00103. Facing LimitsNote: This post is the one hundred and third in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br /><br /><small>"Hope you don't think users are the only abusers niggaz<br />Gettin high within the game<br />If you do then, how would you explain?<br />I'm ten years removed, still the vibe is in my veins<br />I got a hustler spirit, nigga period<br />Check out my hat yo, peep the way I wear it<br />Check out my swag' yo, I walk like a ballplayer<br />No matter where you go, you are what you are, a player<br />And you can try to change but that's just the top layer<br />Man, you was who you was 'fore you got here<br />Only God can judge me, so I'm gone<br />Either love me, or leave me alone"<br /><br />From "Public Service Announcement" by Jay-Z</small><br /><br />----<br /><br /><small>"It all belongs to Caesar, It all belongs to Caesar<br />Go to the bank, Go to the bank<br />We're going down to Mexico<br />To get away from this culture<br />Go to the bank..."<br /><br />from "Go to the Bank", by James<sup>1</sup></small><br /><br />----<br /><br />I've been reading through the archives of Morris Berman's <a href="http://morrisberman.blogspot.ca/">blog</a>.<br /><br />Writing this series of posts has led me into a habit of automatically classifying people as commercially or guardian minded (remarkably few people seem to manage to see both sides on a regular basis) and Berman is one of the clearest cut cases of a Guardian thinker I've come across. Whether he's decrying the building of a casino at Gettysburg (lack of respect for tradition), supporting efforts to take vengeance against the current U.S. elite (encouraging people to vote for Sarah Palin to speed up the collapse, for example), or recounting the loss of community in the face of a relentless self-interested thirst for more consumption, he is consistently singing from the Guardian songbook.<br /><br />Berman is best known for a series of books on the decline of the American civilization, the most recent of which, "<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/06/the-decline-of-imperial-america/">Why America Failed</a>" traces the roots of America's cultural decline to its origins as a nation of 'hustlers' and the eventual takeover of the nation by commercial (hustling) interests.<br /><br />Of course, there are lots of folks out there commenting on the decline of our civilization, and lamenting the commercial takeover of our communities. But it was <a href="http://morrisberman.blogspot.ca/2009_09_06_archive.html">one post</a> in particular, that I wanted to mention here, the reason being that in this post Berman comes quite close to recounting some of the main points I've been circling here.<br /><br />In this particular post, Berman likens humans to frogs: <br /><br /><blockquote>"[In] An experiment with frogs some years ago ... [they] were wired up with electrodes in the pleasure center of the brain, and could stimulate that center–i.e., create a 'rush'–by pressing a metal bar. Not only did the frogs keep pressing the bar over and over again, but they didn’t stop even when their legs were cut off with a pair of shears."</blockquote><br /><br />Berman does allow that some of us frogs are a bit smarter than others:<br /><br /><blockquote>"The first intelligent frog who comes to mind is the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, perhaps most famous for having been married to Margaret Mead. For Bateson, the issue was an ethical one. As he himself put it, 'the ethics of optima and the ethics of maxima are totally different ethical systems.' The ethics of maxima knows only one rule: more. More is better, in this scheme of things; words such as 'limits' or 'enough' are either foolish or meaningless. Clearly, the 'American Way of Life' is a system of maxima, of indefinite expansion."<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Berman links the notion of respecting (or not) limits, with the goal of maximization vs. optimization, and from there, with the difference between individual and collective decision making:<br /><br /><blockquote>"the economist Robert Frank, writing in the New York Times (12 July 2009), argues that 'traits that help individuals are harmful to larger groups. For instance,' he goes on,<br /><br />'a mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates. But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods.'"<br /><br />The problem is that what was rational on the individual level was irrational on the collective level, thus leading to a systemic collapse.<br /><br />We are thus led, quite naturally, from a consideration of optima vs. maxima to the question of individual vs. collective behavior."</blockquote><br /><br />Berman goes even further to note that democracy is a more tenuous method of transforming individual preferences into collective behaviour vs. dictatorship:<br /><br /><blockquote>How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system? For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries–the Scandanavian nations come to mind–where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons. But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for most of Latin America, is the United States, where proposed “changes” are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 306 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones–Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al.–aren’t going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard."</blockquote><br /><br />...<br /><br /><blockquote>"Of course, authoritarian systems don’t have these problems, which is a good indicator of how things will probably develop. Under the name of 'harmony', for example, China regulates its citizens for what it perceives to be the common good. Hence the famous one-child policy, introduced in 1979, supposedly prevented more than 300 million births over the next 29 years in a country that was threatened by its own population density. In the case of the United States, the imposition of rules and limits on individual behavior to protect the commons is not, at present, a realistic prospect; the population is simply not having it, end of story. But how much longer before this freedom of choice is regarded as an impossible luxury?"</blockquote><br /><br />So, just in this one post, Berman covers quite well one of the main areas that separates the guardian syndrome from the commercial one, the ability to deal with / impose limits. The commercial syndrome prioritizes individual competition which prevents collective (cooperative) decision making, which can work in an unlimited domain where maximization is the goal, but fails when faced by a limit because it becomes impossible to constrain individuals to respect the limits and to optimize rather than maximize, and to allocate shares within the limit rather than everyone just taking as much as they can.<br /><br />And he raises an interesting question, if the citizens in a country face real limits, but would rather pretend those limits don't exist and will only elect politicians who act as if those limits don't exist, will democracy survive?<br /><br /><br /><br />---<br /><sup>1</sup>As an aside, I was looking up the lyrics for the James song I referenced at the top of the post, and ended up at the <a href="http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858528308/">song meanings</a> entry for a different (but similarly themed) James song, "Lost a Friend (to the sea)" about a man trying to free a friend from living in the world of television and bring them back to reality. While there, I found one of those occasional nuggets of gold that one gets if you sift through enough of the mountains of dirt that make up most comment sections on the web, a comment from 'draven66':<br /><br /><blockquote>"I logged onto facebook.com for the first time yesterday and realized that I have lost my friends to the sea. A sea of electronic lies, bloated materialism, and denial that hides their suspended disbelief that modern western lifestyles of decay are not only consuming them but everyone we kill under "foreign policy" to maintain this sick way of life. You've seen it before .. those tired sore smiles that say "I am hypnotized, and adequately, even willingly! desensitized, and sedated! Please don't let my suspicions be true, please just give me another hit. The worst part is when everyone can capture it fifty times a day, digitally. This life was made possible by FUTURE SHOP, keep on pretending you sad empty sheep, you are owned and cultivated and laughed at! GOD I feel so alone.<br /><br />Nice song though."</blockquote>Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2012/04/103-facing-limits.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-65079063795333059002012-04-11T18:14:00.000-07:002012-04-11T18:14:00.217-07:00102. The Republic, Part 1cNote: This post is the one hundred and second in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />Note also: this is a continuation from <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/12/100-republic-part-1a.html">post 100</a> and <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.ca/2011/02/101-republic-part-1b.html">post 101</a>.<br /><br />Note finally: Quotes are taken from <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1497/pg1497.txt">this version</a> of The Republic<br /><br />After Glaucon and Adeimantus make their case for justice being just a means rather than an end in itself, they ask Socrates to convince them justice is more than that, and to show them how living a just life makes a man good and living an unjust life makes a man evil, regardless of what benefits or honours might flow from just or unjust behaviour.<br /><br />Socrates suggests that they search for an answer by examining the state, rather than the individual since the truth will be easier to find in the larger case. What follows is the longest section of The Republic, where Socrates outlines the ideal state.<br /><br />Initially, Socrates constructs a small state which is enough to satisfy man's basic needs. But Glaucon argues that people need more than just their basic needs, they need comfort as well,<br /><br /><blockquote>"you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style." </blockquote><br /><br />Socrates sees where this simple, but potentially unlimited desire for comfort will lead,<br /><blockquote><br />"Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described. But if you wish also to see a State at fever-heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way of life. They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured."<br /><br />Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is<br />no longer sufficient.<br /><br />...<br /><br />And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants<br />will be too small now, and not enough?<br /><br />...<br /><br />Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture<br />and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves,<br />they <span style="font-weight:bold;">exceed the limit</span> of necessity, and give themselves up to the<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">unlimited accumulation</span> of wealth?<br /><br />...<br /><br />And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?"</blockquote><br />(emphasis added)<br /><br />From the desire for luxury, from always wanting more than what is currently had, comes conflict, and with conflict, the need for guardians to protect the state. <br /><br />Note: Der Spiegel had an interesting interview with economist/philosopher Tomas Sedlacek the other day, "<a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,822981,00.html">Greed is the Beginning of Everything,</a>" which touched on this theme repeatedly.<br /><br />---<br />Socrates explains that the guardians must have a somewhat philosophical nature, since they must welcome knowledge, since they will need to be gentle with their friends whom they know, while remaining ruthless with enemies, who are strangers.<br /><br />Socrates identifies loyalty as a primary job requirement for guardians, <blockquote>"Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest, should any word be said to them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one another, for they are not true."<br /></blockquote><br />A little later on, he also notes that lying is not always a bad thing, <blockquote>"the lie in words is in certain cases useful and not hateful; in dealing with enemies--that would be an instance; or again, when those whom we call our friends in a fit of madness or illusion are going to do some harm, then it is useful and is a sort of medicine or preventive"</blockquote><br /><br />Later on, Socrates emphasizes the importance of only people with the right nature being in the guardian class (and vice-versa), <blockquote>"Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. They should observe what elements mingle in their offspring; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that <span style="font-weight:bold;">when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed.</span>"</blockquote><br />(emphasis added)<br /><br />Socrates emphasizes that in order for guardians to be true guardians, they must renounce greed and a desire for material possessions, <blockquote>"In the first place, none of them should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against any one who has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live together like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and they will be the saviours of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand."</blockquote><br /><br />Later on, Socrates defines justice as each man sticking to his own line of work and not meddling in areas he is not suited for.<br /><br /><blockquote>"Think, now, and say whether you agree with me or not. Suppose a carpenter to be doing the business of a cobbler, or a cobbler of a carpenter; and suppose them to exchange their implements or their duties, or the same person to be doing the work of both, or whatever be the change; do you think that any great harm would result to the State?<br /><br />Not much.<br /><br />But when the cobbler or any other man whom nature designed to be a trader, having his heart lifted up by wealth or strength or the number of his followers, or any like advantage, attempts to force his way into the class of warriors, or a warrior into that of legislators and guardians, for which he is unfitted, and either to take the implements or the duties of the other; or when one man is trader, legislator, and<br />warrior all in one, then I think you will agree with me in saying that this interchange and this meddling of one with another is the ruin of the State.<br /><br />Most true.<br /><br />Seeing then, I said, that there are three distinct classes, any meddling of one with another, or the change of one into another, is the greatest harm to the State, and may be most justly termed evil-doing? <br /><br />Precisely.<br /><br />And the greatest degree of evil-doing to one's own city would be termed by you injustice?<br /><br />Certainly.<br /><br />This then is injustice; and on the other hand when the trader, the auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is justice, and will make the city just."</blockquote><br /><br />The final key element is that Socrates now explains that, like the state which has a philosopher at its head, loyal guardians protecting it and supporting the ruler, and a mass of citizens who seek to satisfy their desires for comfort and convenience, a man is the same, with a tri-partite nature, and that, like the state, a man is just when the rational part of his brain is in control of his material desires, with his spirit supporting the rational part of his brain in suppressing the material desires of his body from interfering with his pursuit of justice.<br /><br /><blockquote>"now model the form of a multitudinous, many-headed monster, having a ring of heads of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, which he is able to generate and metamorphose at will.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Suppose now that you make a second form as of a lion, and a third of a man, the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the second.<br /><br />...<br /><br />And now join them, and let the three grow into one.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Next fashion the outside of them into a single image, as of a man, so that he who is not able to look within, and sees only the outer hull, may believe the beast to be a single human creature. <br /><br />...<br /><br />And now, to him who maintains that it is profitable for the human creature to be unjust, and unprofitable to be just, let us reply that, if he be right, it is profitable for this creature to feast the multitudinous monster and strengthen the lion and the lion-like qualities, but to starve and weaken the man, who is consequently liable to be dragged about at the mercy of either of the other two; and he is not to attempt to familiarize or harmonize them with one another--he ought rather to suffer them to fight and bite and devour one another.<br /><br />Certainly, he said; that is what the approver of injustice says.<br /><br />To him the supporter of justice makes answer that he should ever so speak and act as to give the man within him in some way or other the most complete mastery over the entire human creature. He should watch over the many-headed monster like a good husbandman, fostering and cultivating the gentle qualities, and preventing the wild ones from growing; he should be making the lion-heart his ally, and in common care of them all should be uniting the several parts with one another and with himself.</blockquote><br /><br />So, to summarize Plato's argument:<br /><br />A state functions best when the three classes each stick to their own work. A philosopher to rule with wisdom, a guardian class to serve with honour and courage, shunning all material possession and desire, and a trading class to pursue material comfort and provide for the basic needs of the state. Mixing people into the wrong tasks is, by definition, injustice, and will lead to the destruction of the state.<br /><br />And a man is the same, his sense of reason must be the primary decision maker, his spirit or passion acting in service of reason, and the insatiable desire for material wealth and comfort must be tamed and controlled so that it does not exceed it's natural domain.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com1http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2012/04/102-republic-part-1c.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-27523628983517951362012-04-05T21:10:00.005-07:002012-04-05T21:19:58.773-07:00The Economy in my LifetimeYes, I still plan to continue on with my series of posts on ethics, I just need to stop being lazy. But in the meantime, I thought I'd share <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/michael-hudson-on-why-there-is-an-alternative-to-european-austerity.html">this link</a> to an interview with Michael Hudson since he does a great job summarizing everything I've come to understand about how our economy works in the period since I've been alive, a period of increasing debt, stagnant wages, private takeover of public goods, tax cuts for the wealthy, increased corruption and increasing inequality.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com1http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2012/04/economy-in-my-lifetime.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-67257412782728296122012-02-08T20:22:00.000-08:002012-02-08T16:01:53.978-08:00101. The Republic Part 1bNote: This post is the one hundred and first in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />Note also: this is a continuation from <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/12/100-republic-part-1a.html">post 100</a>.<br /><br />"Power Corrupts. Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely"<br /><br /><small><span style="font-style:italic;">proverb<br /></span></small><br /><br /><br />"Hey Bob, Supe had a straight job<br />Even though he could have smashed through any bank<br />in the United States. He had the strength, but he would not<br /><br />...<br /><br />Superman never made any money saving the world from Solomon Grundy<br />And sometimes I despair the world will never seen another man,<br />Like him"<br /><br /><br /><small><span style="font-style:italic;">Crash Test Dummies, Superman Song<br /></span></small><br /><br /><br />In Book 2 of the Republic, Thrasymachus has quit the field and Socrates thinks the discussion is over. But Glaucon and Adeimantus pursue the argument further, pressing Socrates to explain to them how justice is not just something that is sought for the benefits it brings, but is also an end in itself.<br /><br />Glaucon gets Socrates to agree that there are three classes of goods: those which are unpleasant in themselves but serve a worthwhile purpose (e.g. medicine), those which are pleasurable in and of themselves (e.g. eating) and those which serve a worthwhile purpose and are worthwhile on their own merits, and furthermore to agree that justice falls into the third category.<br /><blockquote><br />'How would you arrange goods --are there not some which we welcome for their own sakes, and independently of their consequences, as, for example, harmless pleasures and enjoyments, which delight us at the time, although nothing follows from them? <br /><br />I agree in thinking that there is such a class, I replied. <br />Is there not also a second class of goods, such as knowledge, sight, health, which are desirable not only in themselves, but also for their results? <br /><br />Certainly, I said. <br />And would you not recognize a third class, such as gymnastic, and the care of the sick, and the physician's art; also the various ways of money-making --these do us good but we regard them as disagreeable; and no one would choose them for their own sakes, but only for the sake of some reward or result which flows from them? <br /><br />There is, I said, this third class also. But why do you ask? <br />Because I want to know in which of the three classes you would place justice? <br /><br />In the highest class, I replied, --among those goods which he who would be happy desires both for their own sake and for the sake of their results. <br /><br />Then the many are of another mind; they think that justice is to be reckoned in the troublesome class, among goods which are to be pursued for the sake of rewards and of reputation, but in themselves are disagreeable and rather to be avoided.'</blockquote><br /><br /><br />Glaucon points out that Greek society seems to be of the opinion that justice falls into the 'troublesome' class of goods. From this argument it follows that if a man had the power of avoiding retribution – if, for example he possessed a ring of invisibility - then that man would be foolish to still be just, but instead would be better off pursuing injustice.<br /><br /><blockquote>'They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice; --it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of justice.'</blockquote><br /><br />It also follows that it is enough to merely seem just rather than actually being just, since this will bring on the rewards from others that are given to the just, and avoid the punishments handed down the unjust.<br /><br />Glaucon explains how the life of the unjust man who seems just will compare to the life of the just man who is seen as unjust, <blockquote>'the just man who is thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound --will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled: Then he will understand that he ought to seem only, and not to be, just; the words of Aeschylus may be more truly spoken of the unjust than of the just. For the unjust is pursuing a reality; he does not live with a view to appearances --he wants to be really unjust and not to seem only:-- <br /><br />His mind has a soil deep and fertile, <br />Out of which spring his prudent counsels. In the first place, he is thought just, and therefore bears rule in the city; he can marry whom he will, and give in marriage to whom he will; also he can trade and deal where he likes, and always to his own advantage, because he has no misgivings about injustice and at every contest, whether in public or private, he gets the better of his antagonists, and gains at their expense, and is rich, and out of his gains he can benefit his friends, and harm his enemies; moreover, he can offer sacrifices, and dedicate gifts to the gods abundantly and magnificently, and can honour the gods or any man whom he wants to honour in a far better style than the just, and therefore he is likely to be dearer than they are to the gods. And thus, Socrates, gods and men are said to unite in making the life of the unjust better than the life of the just.'</blockquote><br /><br />At this point Adeimantus jumps in to add that Glaucon’s account of justice is consistent with the message from poets and prose writers and parents and tutors, all of whom encourage the young to become just, not for the sake of justice and their own spirit or soul, but for the rewards that come from being seen as just, with respect to opportunities for advancement and so on.<br /><br /><blockquote>'Parents and tutors are always telling their sons and their wards that they are to be just; but why? not for the sake of justice, but for the sake of character and reputation; in the hope of obtaining for him who is reputed just some of those offices, marriages, and the like which Glaucon has enumerated among the advantages accruing to the unjust from the reputation of justice. More, however, is made of appearances by this class of persons than by the others; for they throw in the good opinion of the gods, and will tell you of a shower of benefits which the heavens, as they say, rain upon the pious; and this accords with the testimony of the noble Hesiod and Homer, the first of whom says, that the gods make the oaks of the just'</blockquote><br /><br />This is, in my opinion, the most eloquent of all the books in the Republic, and I have to say it makes a very convincing case for the notion that justice is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Plato seems to feel the same way as he has Socrates praise the argument made by Glaucon and Adeimantus and admit that he feels unequal to the challenge of refuting it.<br /><br />Indeed, the rest of the book is a roundabout approach to refuting this argument with Socrates first constructing the ideal state (the Republic) and then showing how someone who has uncontestable power and uses that power for their own ends (a tyrant) will end up the worst off of all men, in the same manner that tyranny is the worst form of government.<br /><br />To be honest, I'm not really sure what to say about this book other than that it was thought provoking.<br /><br />On the one hand, like the interlocutors in the Republic, I have a gut feeling that even if one was all powerful, the regular rules of justice should still apply. On the other hand, it does seem that society mostly seems to value justice as an end rather than on its own merits, and I do see how if one person was all powerful, the notion of 'take vengeance' which is a central part of the guardian syndrome would cease to have meaning for everyone else, since they would be powerless to take revenge on an all powerful person. <br /><br />Certainly, any notion to construct a system of morals which argued that people pursued justice because it was in their own self-interest, would strugghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifle not to admit that the all powerful person could be expected to disregard justice as a notion for lesser beings.<br /><br />For that reason, David Gauthier took up this issue in his work, '<a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/08/23-morals-by-agreement-constrained.html">Morals by Agreement</a>' eventually reaching an argument similar to the one employed in the movie, '<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1001526/">Megamind</a>' - that even an all powerful person would have an interest in society being successful since a successful society is just more pleasant to be around than a downtrodden one. Gauthier ends up by arguing that it is because people have a certain element of socialness, or care for other people, that even if they had absolute power, they would still place a value on behaving justly towards others, even when they have no need of it to get what they want.<br /><br />But still, at some level, the ability to requite or take vengeance does have to be present in order for the concept of justice to operate. For example, people hardly treat animals with anything resembling the human notion of justice but I suspect that if animals were able to rise up and rebel against their human oppressors, showing that they had the power to 'take an eye for a ribeye' this would lead to a new relationship which might extend the human notion of justice towards animals further than it goes currently.<br /><br /><br /><br />---<br />site note: Posting may move to Wednesday for a while due to other commitments on Tuesday nights.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/02/101-republic-part-1b.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-33563881574445410332011-12-20T22:18:00.000-08:002011-12-20T22:27:26.049-08:00100. The Republic: Part 1aNote: This post is the one hundredth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />Note also: this is a continuation from <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/10/98-republic-part-2.html">post 98</a>.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />"I'm gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha.<br />One way or another"<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><small>One Way or Another, Blondie</small></span><br /><br /><br /><br />In the first chapter of '<a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.2.i.html">The Republic</a>', Plato sets out to demonstrate the flaws in the some of the conventional views of what justice is. He does this by, in the words of Jane Jacobs, 'syndrome hopping'.<br /><br />The way it works is that when given a notion of justice that corresponds to the commercial syndrome, Socrates will then trip the person who suggested it up by putting the commercial notion of justice in a guardian setting, and then vice-versa when a guardian notion of justice is presented.<br /><br />First off, he asks the businessman, Cephalus, to define justice, and Cepahlus suggests that justice is the repayment of debts, a commercial sort of answer. So Socrates then asks if one should return a weapon to a friend who is not of sound mind, which is a guardian type situation where clearly loyalty and concern for another takes precedence over the commercial virtues of honesty and keeping a promise.<br /><br />Led in this Guardian direction, Polemarchus who has taken over the argument for his father Cephalus, goes with it, and is led by Socrates into a guardian view of justice which is that giving people what they are owed really means giving good to one's friends and harm to one's enemies.<br /><br />Socrates then switches back to a commercial argument, suggesting that, as in the the commercial syndrome, it is not right to harm anyone since that will have a negative effect on their well-being, so the idea that part of justice is doing harm to one's enemies (true in a guardian context) must not be right (as seen in the commercial context).<br /><br />Next, the sophist Thrasymachus enters the fray, with a new twist, offering a definition of justice, quite popular to the present day, which borrows the self-interested parts of both syndromes to build a selfish 'monstrous hybrid' as Jane Jacobs would have called it. Thrasymachus maintains that justice is simply the interest of the stronger or as we might say nowadays, that 'might makes right'.<br /><br />In his response, Socrates focuses on the inappropriateness of bringing the Commercial syndrome notion of self-interest into the Guardian role of being the ruler (as opposed to the alternative approach which would have been to show the inappropriateness of bring Guardian virtues of deceit and force into a commercial venture).<br /><br />First, Socrates responds via allegory to various professions such as medicine where fulfilling the duties of that profession successfully entails serving the interest of the subject (e.g. the patient, for a doctor) rather than serving one's own interests. He notes that if people ruled for their own interest, then it wouldn't be necessary to pay people to take on the job in most cases.<br /><br />Next, Socrates asks about the relationship between the just and the unjust. He shows that in professions, the just, for example, doctor, only professes to exceed in skill non-doctors, not other doctors. His point is that it is the just who only claim to better than the unjust, while it is the unjust who claim to be better than everyone, just or unjust alike.<br /><br />At this point, I couldn't help but be reminded of the <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2010/07/61-evolution-of-cooperation-part-1-of-2.html">experiments on cooperation</a> conducted by Robert Axelrod, in which a simple tit-for-tat strategy (that only punished the unjust and cooperated with the just) proved to be the most successful in the tournament.<br /><br />Finally, Socrates points out that even thieves need a willingness to forego their own interests, lest they fall to fighting amongst themselves and all ending up getting long sentences in a prisoner's dilemma (i.e. their lack of unity will preclude them from being effective in any meaningful way).<br /><br />At the end of book 1, Socrates admits that while he has repeatedly pointed out what justice is not, he has yet to make any progress on saying what justice is.<br /><br />He leaves that challenge for a later book, and I'll have to leave it for a later post.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/12/100-republic-part-1a.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-6676715895939145122011-11-08T18:53:00.000-08:002011-11-08T18:53:00.895-08:0099. Self-Interest, Hypocrisy and the Commercial TakeoverNote: This post is the ninety-ninth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />I don't have enough time this week to do justice to the rest of 'The Republic' so instead I just wanted to mention <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/i-do-not-think-that-word-means-what-you-think-it-means-hypocrisy-edition/">this post</a> by Paul Krugman.<br /><br />Krugman starts by referencing a Mel Gibson movie from a few years back that was entitled, '<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0187393/">The Patriot</a>' but featured a protagonist who was unwilling to fight for his country until his own family was attacked, and then embarked on a campaign for personal vengeance. Krugman links to <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/2000/07/unpatriotic.single.html">an essay</a> by Michael Lind that explains how this is hardly an example of what is normally referred to as patriotism.<br /><br />Krugman sees a similar confusion when wealthy people who support measures that will benefit the poor or middle class are attacked as hypocrites <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/i-do-not-think-that-word-means-what-politico-thinks-it-means/">(for example)</a> for not being selfish.<br /><br />Says Krugman,<br /><br /><blockquote>"Which brings me to the subject of this post, the apparently equally misunderstood concept of hypocrisy. I’ve been getting some personal attacks on this front, but it’s a bigger issue than that. Here’s the personal version: suppose that you’re a professor/columnist who advocates higher taxes on high incomes and a stronger social safety net — but you yourself earn enough from various sources that you will pay some of those higher taxes and are unlikely to rely on that stronger safety net. A remarkable number of people look at that combination of personal and political positions and cry 'Hypocrisy!'<br /><br />...<br /><br />If you remember the 2004 election, which unfortunately I do, there were quite a few journalists who basically accused John Kerry of being 'inauthentic' because he was a rich man advocating policies that would help the poor and the middle class. Apparently you can only be authentic if your politics reflect pure personal self-interest<br /><br />...<br /><br />So to say what should be obvious but apparently isn't: supporting policies that are to your personal financial disadvantage isn't hypocrisy — it’s civic virtue!<br /><br />...<br /><br />Lind's essay about Mel Gibson ended with concerns that we may have lost the sense of what citizenship and its duties mean. Indeed. If people can't comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost."<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Another example, that Krugman doesn’t mention is the field of '<a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2010/10/67-public-choice-theory.html">Public Choice Theory</a>' which is premised on the notion that neither civic virtue nor patriotism exist.<br /><br />Anyway, I just wanted to highlight this post from Krugman because what he is observing is what I have observed myself, and what provides some of my motivation for pursuing this series of posts. It seems as though commercial syndrome virtues are gradually driving out guardian virtues in our discourse, to such an extent that classic guardian precepts such as patriotism and civic virtue are now seen through a commercial lens as either hypocritical or incomprehensible for a growing percentage of the population. And on that note, it's time for a vacation, see you in a few weeks...Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/11/99-self-interest-hypocrisy-and.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-37435770903516447602011-10-25T20:02:00.000-07:002011-10-25T20:02:00.894-07:0098. The Republic, Part 2Note: This post is the ninety-eighth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />In this post, I'm going to talk about 'The Republic' by Plato. In 'The Republic' Plato sets out his vision of the ideal state, but in this week's post, I just want to cover chapter 8, near the end of The Republic, in which Plato sets out the other types of states and how, starting in his ideal republic, states decay from one mode of government to another over time. Plato wasn't trying to say that this progression is always exactly followed and the introduction that I read was quite dismissive of the realism of Plato's proposed progression, but personally, I found his description to be quite true to the history of our own culture - which is a little worrying since he claims that democracy is followed by tyranny.<br /><br />Anyway, the first alternative form of state that is first to emerge from the ideal republic is one that Plato says corresponds roughly to the Spartan model and he refers to it as Timarchy, or "the government of honour". The government of honour differs from Plato's ideal Republic in that the ruling class has begun to be corrupted by a love of money so that they maintain private stores of wealth and build castles to protect them. In addition, the state is governed by a warrior-king rather than a philosopher king and there is a near constant state of warfare. <br /><br />(note: The Republic is written as a dialogue. In this book, Socrates is doing the talking and his friends Glaucon and Adeimantus are playing the role of agreeable yes-men.)<br /><br /><blockquote><br />"In the honour given to rulers, in the abstinence of the warrior class from agriculture, handicrafts, and trade in general, in the institution of common meals, and in the attention paid to gymnastics and military training—in all these respects this State will resemble the former [Plato's ideal Republic].<br /><br />True.<br /><br />But in the fear of admitting philosophers to power, because they are no longer to be had simple and earnest, but are made up of mixed elements; and in turning from them to passionate and less complex characters, who are by nature fitted for war rather than peace; and in the value set by them upon military stratagems and contrivances, and in the waging of everlasting wars—this State will be for the most part peculiar.<br /><br />Yes.<br /><br />Yes, I said; and men of this stamp will be covetous of money, like those who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing after gold and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having magazines and treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment of them; also castles which are just nests for their eggs, and in which they will spend large sums on their wives, or on any others whom they please."</blockquote> <br /><br />As he describes each state, Plato also describes the sort of person who inhabits that state, and shows how each personality type derives from the last.<br /><br /><blockquote>"He [The man in the Timocratic state] should have more of self-assertion and be less cultivated, and yet a friend of culture; and he should be a good listener, but no speaker. Such a person is apt to be rough with slaves, unlike the educated man, who is too proud for that; and he will also be courteous to freemen, and remarkably obedient to authority; he is a lover of power and a lover of honour; claiming to be a ruler, not because he is eloquent, or on any ground of that sort, but because he is a soldier and has performed feats of arms; he is also a lover of gymnastic exercises and of the chase.<br /><br />Yes, that is the type of character which answers to timocracy.<br /><br />Such an one will despise riches only when he is young; but as he gets older he will be more and more attracted to them, because he has a piece of the avaricious nature in him, and is not single-minded towards virtue, having lost his best guardian.<br /><br />Who was that? said Adeimantus.<br /><br />Philosophy, I said, tempered with music, who comes and takes up her abode in a man, and is the only saviour of his virtue throughout life.<br /><br />Good, he said.<br /><br />Such, I said, is the timocratical youth, and he is like the timocratical State." </blockquote><br /><br />Plato's description of a society that is warlike and contentious, filled with brave men who build castles and live under a 'government of honour' certainly bears more than a passing resemblance to the medieval period and its code of chivalry.<br /><br />In Plato's telling, the 'Government of Honour' eventually gives way to an Oligarchy, "A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it."<br /><br /><blockquote>"The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is the ruin of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do they or their wives care about the law?<br /><br />Yes, indeed.<br /><br />And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.<br /><br />Likely enough.<br /><br />And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.<br /><br />True.<br /><br />And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State, virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.<br /><br />Clearly.<br /><br />And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is neglected.<br /><br />That is obvious.<br /><br />And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.<br /><br />They do so.<br /><br />They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work."<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Plato notes many defects of Oligarchy, including the inability of the Oligarchs to carry out a war successfully, the corruption of having the same group of people doing too many tasks - running both business and government, and the creation of class warfare between the wealthy class and the poor class.<br /><br />The match isn't quite as good, but again, there is a resemblance between the oligarchy that Plato describes and the period of the Industrial revolution, the inequality described by Dickens, powerful 'robber-barons' who controlled the government, a long period with (relatively) little warfare, societies where government was reserved for those with a minimum level of wealth, and a great growth in global trade and wealth which was not particularly widely shared leading to the rise of marxism and communism.<br /><br />Next Plato describes the descent from Oligarchy to Democracy. Basically, where the Oligarchy retained a level of self-discipline, as needed to allow for the accumulation of wealth, in a Democracy restraints are thrown to the winds and people can do as they please.<br /><br /><blockquote>"And then democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power; and this is the form of government in which the magistrates are commonly elected by lot.<br /><br />Yes, he said, that is the nature of democracy, whether the revolution has been effected by arms, or whether fear has caused the opposite party to withdraw.<br /><br />And now what is their manner of life, and what sort of a government have they? for as the government is, such will be the man.<br /><br />Clearly, he said.<br /><br />In the first place, are they not free; and is not the city full of freedom and frankness—a man may say and do what he likes?<br /><br />'Tis said so, he replied.<br /><br />And where freedom is, the individual is clearly able to order for himself his own life as he pleases?<br /><br />Clearly.<br /><br />Then in this kind of State there will be the greatest variety of human natures?<br /><br />There will.<br /><br />This, then, seems likely to be the fairest of States, being like an embroidered robe which is spangled with every sort of flower. And just as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be the fairest of States."<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Again, Plato's description of democracy bears a strong resemblance to our current society that emerged from the World Wars of the early 20th century. Plato notes that the primary characteristics of Democracy are freedom and liberty. So much so that even slaves, women and eventually animals are given the same liberty that is normally reserved for men. But Plato believes that the primacy of liberty and the accompanying unwillingness to allow for any restraint is what sets the stage for tyranny to emerge from democracy.<br /><blockquote><br />"By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends by getting among the animals and infecting them.<br /><br />How do you mean?<br /><br />I mean that the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom, and the metic is equal with the citizen and the citizen with the metic, and the stranger is quite as good as either.<br /><br />Yes, he said, that is the way.<br /><br />And these are not the only evils, I said—there are several lesser ones: In such a state of society the master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and old are all alike; and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word or deed; and old men condescend to the young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety; they are loth to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the young.<br /><br />Quite true, he said.<br /><br />The last extreme of popular liberty is when the slave bought with money, whether male or female, is just as free as his or her purchaser; nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other.<br /><br />Why not, as Aeschylus says, utter the word which rises to our lips?<br /><br />That is what I am doing, I replied; and I must add that no one who does not know would believe, how much greater is the liberty which the animals who are under the dominion of man have in a democracy than in any other State: for truly, the she-dogs, as the proverb says, are as good as their she-mistresses, and the horses and asses have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen; and they will run at any body who comes in their way if he does not leave the road clear for them: and all things are just ready to burst with liberty.<br /><br />When I take a country walk, he said, I often experience what you describe. You and I have dreamed the same thing.<br /><br />And above all, I said, and as the result of all, see how sensitive the citizens become; they chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority, and at length, as you know, they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten; they will have no one over them.<br /><br />Yes, he said, I know it too well.<br /><br />Such, my friend, I said, is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs tyranny."</blockquote><br /><br />Plato describes how idle spendthrifts, who are unwelcome in most states, but "in a democracy they are almost the entire ruling power" come to try and squeeze the wealthy class for their money, leading the wealthy to fight back and become more like oligarchs, leading to an escalating battle until finally the people back a champion who takes their cause against the wealthy and the spendthrifts and this champion is able to seize power under the mantle of serving the people, who don't realize until it is too late how their champion will turn upon them and become a tyrant.<br /><br />One of the most compelling parts of the chapter is where Plato describes how the tyrant is driven by necessity into a more and more depraved existence, forced to drive out all the best and brightest from society since they will be seen as rivals to his power.<br /><br /><blockquote>"At first, in the early days of his power, he is full of smiles, and he salutes every one whom he meets;—he to be called a tyrant, who is making promises in public and also in private! liberating debtors, and distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so kind and good to every one!<br /><br />Of course, he said.<br /><br />But when he has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.<br /><br />To be sure.<br /><br />Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?<br /><br />Clearly.<br /><br />And if any of them are suspected by him of having notions of freedom, and of resistance to his authority, he will have a good pretext for destroying them by placing them at the mercy of the enemy; and for all these reasons the tyrant must be always getting up a war.<br /><br />He must.<br /><br />Now he begins to grow unpopular.<br /><br />A necessary result.<br /><br />Then some of those who joined in setting him up, and who are in power, speak their minds to him and to one another, and the more courageous of them cast in his teeth what is being done.<br /><br />Yes, that may be expected.<br /><br />And the tyrant, if he means to rule, must get rid of them; he cannot stop while he has a friend or an enemy who is good for anything.<br /><br />He cannot.<br /><br />And therefore he must look about him and see who is valiant, who is high-minded, who is wise, who is wealthy; happy man, he is the enemy of them all, and must seek occasion against them whether he will or no, until he has made a purgation of the State.<br /><br />Yes, he said, and a rare purgation.<br /><br />Yes, I said, not the sort of purgation which the physicians make of the body; for they take away the worse and leave the better part, but he does the reverse.<br /><br />If he is to rule, I suppose that he cannot help himself.<br /><br />What a blessed alternative, I said:—to be compelled to dwell only with the many bad, and to be by them hated, or not to live at all!<br /><br />Yes, that is the alternative.<br /><br />And the more detestable his actions are to the citizens the more satellites and the greater devotion in them will he require?<br /><br />Certainly.<br /><br />And who are the devoted band, and where will he procure them?<br /><br />They will flock to him, he said, of their own accord, if he pays them.<br /><br />By the dog! I said, here are more drones, of every sort and from every land.<br /><br />Yes, he said, there are.<br /><br />But will he not desire to get them on the spot?<br /><br />How do you mean?<br /><br />He will rob the citizens of their slaves; he will then set them free and enrol them in his body-guard.<br /><br />To be sure, he said; and he will be able to trust them best of all.<br /><br />What a blessed creature, I said, must this tyrant be; he has put to death the others and has these for his trusted friends."</blockquote><br /><br />In book 9, Plato goes on to describe the miserable existence of the tyrannical man, a mirror of the miserable state that he governs. The miserable life of the tyrant is Plato's final answer to the question of whether it is better to live a life of virtue or vice, since it is vice that leads to tyranny, and tyranny leads to the misery of the one who practices it (obviously I'm oversimplifying here), but that is not the main point in this post. In this post, I just wanted to highlight the prescience of Plato's description of the succession of states and how well it seems to correspond to our own pro(re)gression. We can only hope that he was wrong about tyranny following democracy, or at least that it will follow on sometime in the future after we have passed on ourselves.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/10/98-republic-part-2.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-13239792313593218852011-09-27T20:30:00.000-07:002011-09-27T20:30:01.052-07:0097. Guardian Syndrome Derangement SyndromeNote: This post is the ninety-seventh in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />Today's post is about a group of people who excel at creating prosperity via trade, but find themselves politically oppressed, the fruits of their labours taken from them with little recompense. In response, the oppressed group undertakes to escape their chains, using trade where necessary and force where necessary to make their way to an unoccupied piece of land that they can call home, one where they will be free from political oppressors who would use force to take their wealth.<br /><br />The bible contains a story like this, the story of the Jews escaping from the Egyptians and eventually finding their promised land - a story that Jane Jacobs cites in 'Systems of Survival' as a good example of how the same group of people can find success by alternating between using commercial syndrome morality and guardian syndrome morality, depending on which is appropriate in the circumstance.<br /><br />But today's topic is not the Bible, but rather something less concise, the book '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged">Atlas Shrugged</a>' by Ayn Rand. In Atlas Shrugged, the setting is the United States, in the era when railways were still the main form of transportation and planes were a relatively new invention. The U.S. government seems to be run by a collection of corrupt businessmen and politicians and is descending into a mix of fascism and communism. In response, a group of leading industrialists decide to '<a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/go-galt-go-by-tristero-best-idea-in.html">Go Galt</a>,' destroying or abandoning their companies, leaving society behind to join a secret community in a remote part of Colorado.<br /><br />The story, which tells the tale of how the government gradually escalates its level of unprincipled interference with business, is quite lengthy, but luckily the leader of the industrialists, John Galt, sums up Rand's philosophy in a pithy 100 page speech.<br /><br />Unsurprisingly, as a businessman, John Galt's primary sympathy lies with the <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2010/02/38-commercial-syndrome-revisited.html">Commercial Syndrome</a>. This is made clear enough early on in his speech when he assets that, <blockquote>"There is a morality of reason ... man's life [is] the life of a thinking being - not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement."</blockquote><br /><br />Galt recognizes that, unlike the Guardian syndrome in which most of the precepts relate to interactions between people, the commercial syndrome contains <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2010/10/66-dimensions-of-morality.html">a number of precepts that apply to man on his own</a>, in his battle against his own laziness, <blockquote>"You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island - it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim ... that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today - and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves."</blockquote><br /><br />Just a little bit later, Galt lists some of the virtues needed for his moral system, a list which generally matches up pretty well with the commercial syndrome:<br /><blockquote><br />"rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride."</blockquote><br /><br />Finally, a bit later, Galt expresses the commercial basis of his morality explicitly, <blockquote>"The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit-his love friendship, his esteem- except in payment and in trade for human virtues."</blockquote><br /><br />The message is clear, the trader only acts in his own self-interest and cares not for the interests of others. I emphasize this not to criticize, but to contrast with a later point that Galt makes (which we'll get to in a bit).<br /><br />As for comfort and convenience, Galt makes clear over and over again that this is the primary purpose of existence, perhaps most memorably when he asks, <blockquote>"who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress."</blockquote><br /><br />Only a commercially minded philosopher would take the time in his manifesto to extol the comfort of the inner-spring mattress!<br /><br />Naturally, in a moral system based on trade, using force is a big no-no for Galt, <blockquote>"Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate-do you hear me? no man may start the use of physical force against others."</blockquote><br /><br />Galt spends so much time repetitively criticizing those who would use force for corrupt purposes that it is easy to lose track of the fact that he does condone the use of force when necessary. Perhaps the most remarkable passage of Atlas Shrugged is this one, where Galt describes when he will use force.<br /><br /><blockquote>"It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; <span style="font-weight:bold;">I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man.</span> I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil."</blockquote><br /><br />The story backs this statement up, containing a number of instances where Galt and his fellow tribe members throw comfort and convenience to the winds and sacrifice themselves by showing fortitude, employing force and fraud, discipline and obedience in order to successfully fight physical battles against their enemies. On one instance there is a pitched battle vs. troublemakers at a steel factory, in another case, there is a hostage to be rescued.<br /><br />So notice what has happened here. Galt spends 98 pages of his 100 page speech talking about how the only set of moral values that exists is the commercial syndrome, where self-interest rules, comfort and convenience are paramount and force and fraud are verboten. But then in the other 2 pages he sneaks in this alternate world where, when violence is initiated, suddenly action must be taken, and now force and fraud are not just allowed, but required, and the person undertaking them is expected to be proficient in their use. Not only that, but these actions of force and fraud must only be undertaken in a spirit of sacrifice, in which comfort and convenience are discarded or put at risk, and it is acting in self-interest that is now forbidden!<br /><br />Later on, Galt allows that government is needed to enforce rules, to retaliate against those who would commit violence, and to defend the state against enemies from outside. Sadly he never seems to explain how it is the people doing this will be paid, or how they will be restrained from using their power to enrich themselves. <br /> <br />I think that if Rand hadn't been inflicted with such a strong a case of Guardian derangement syndrome (or Guardian syndrome derangement?), much like the one that got <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2010/02/41-theory-of-leisure-guardian-class.html">Thorstein Veblen,</a> she probably could have set out a pretty reasonable pair of moral syndromes that matched up fairly well with Plato and Jane Jacobs. It's just too bad her work is filled with so much distracting pointlessness (such as the endless insistence that reality is real or that only gold can be 'real money') that it takes away from this message.<br /><br /><br />---<br />As an aside, one of the more ludicrous story elements in 'Atlas Shrugged' is the notion that society collapses because a couple of hundred industrialists head off to Colorado for a while. Which is fine, the story is meant to make a point, not to be plausible, but I thought it was interesting to point out why Rand needed such an unbelievable plot point in her book. <br /><br />The great weakness of a collection of traders is that they are all out for their own interest and that they are (by definition) incapable of acting in a collective manner. Their nature is competition, not monopoly. In the real world, if Steve Jobs left for Colorado and destroyed the Apple company, there are plenty of others willing and able to manufacture phones and provide a service to download songs from the internet. If General Motors shut down, the other car companies could easily pick up the slack. But in Atlas Shrugged, Rand is constantly creating little mini-monopolies by insisting that there is only one company that can make steel properly, only one railway that can run a decent operation, only one person who can find and produce oil, etc. <br /><br />Rand needs these monopolies in order to allow her collection of industrialists who go on 'strike' and leave for Colorado to have an actual impact on society, instead of just <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/silicon-valley-billionaire-funding-creation-artificial-libertarian-islands-140840896.html">looking foolish</a>. But Rand, who was so attentive to the nature of the commercial syndrome - the competition, the lack of solidarity that would prevent any strike action from being successful, really should have known better. After all, even the Bible, which certainly doesn't shy away from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah">implausible pronouncements</a>, didn't try to insist that Egyptian society collapsed because it couldn't function without the Jews, so that Moses could come back to give the Pharaoh a long, tedious, 'I told you so.'Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/09/97-guardian-syndrome-derangement.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-52443142389726144032011-09-20T22:01:00.001-07:002011-09-20T22:02:16.982-07:00Site NoteJust a quick word today to note that I am still blogging, just taking a break during Vancouver's one month of nice weather this year. Most likely I'll return to posting next week.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com1http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/09/site-note.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-24604264566845232372011-08-16T22:06:00.000-07:002011-08-16T22:08:54.130-07:0096. Guardian free zone?Note: This post is the ninety-sixth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.
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<br />This week I'm going to cover a thought experiment I've been turning over in my mind for the last few days. In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs explains that Communism is what results when the guardian syndrome takes over the commercial syndrome. With the breach in the 'shun trading' precept from the Guardian syndrome, the Guardians took control of commerce leading to a failure of the commercial precepts (innovation, efficiency, honesty, dissent, etc.) as they were superseded by Guardian precepts such as (make rich use of leisure, be fatalistic, be exclusive, etc.) But what I wonder is, what would happen in the reverse scenario? What if a group of people decided that they would be governed by commercial principles only rather than guardian ones?
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<br />My first thought was that, since one of the commercial precepts is to shun force, the only way this community could survive would be to completely avoid all guardian types who would be willing to use force to seize any wealth generated by the commercial activity. Thinking of this I was reminded of the origins of the great trading nation of Venice, in an out of the way lagoon that was safe from the marauding guardian types running rampant in those days. Of course, any member of our hypothetical non-violent commercial society could take over the whole enterprise if they resorted to force, given that the commercial folks would be unwilling to use force to resist. So the commercial society would have to be extremely careful about who was allowed in, since only 100% acceptance of their morals would be a stable situation.
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<br />Given the constraints on the use of violence, it seems completely infeasible to me that a pure commercial society could exist for any length of time, or even form in the first place.
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<br />In order to make the commercial society at all viable, there needs to be some mechanism for dealing with those who would use force against it. A location with natural defenses (such as an island in the case of England, another great trading nation) would help, but could never be a complete solution. The logical commercial solution would be to hire mercenaries to enforce the rule of non-violence, much in the way that medieval aristocrats had stewards to trade on their behalf.
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<br />Of course, the difficulties of this approach are obvious and were well explained by <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2010/06/57-prince.html">Machiavelli</a>. The mercenary, must be at least two things: willing to use force, and motivated by wealth. It seems clear that the mercenary will eventually decide that they can make more wealth by turning on their paymaster than by simply accepting their pay.
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<br />Another option would be for the commercial folks to make an exemption in their rules of non-violence to allow for vengeance to be taken against acts of force or fraud. In other words, when dealing with a person who does not follow their commercial code, they in turn would choose to use a different moral code, one that condones violence as an act of vengeance against those who initiated violence. But this still causes some issues. A google search for the term <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2010/03/odds-and-ends_18.html">'costly punishment</a>' will uncover lots of academic work which has focussed on the question of whether it makes sense, from the rational commercial syndrome point of view, to take vengeance against someone who has used force against you. The trouble is that the act of taking vengeance benefits the whole commercial society by protecting it against the incursions of someone willing to use force, but the cost of taking vengeance (punishing the perpetrator) falls solely on the person who does the punishing.
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<br />Researchers starting from a premise of rational self-interested behaviour have struggled to explain why people are willing to go beyond what is 'rational' in their willingness to punish those who have wronged them. But of course, if people have a moral value of taking vengeance this puzzle disappears, much as the <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/06/15-logic-of-collective-action_11.html">Mancur Olson</a> explained that a moral value of loyalty or cooperation could mitigate the puzzle of how collective action can be sustained by large groups.
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<br />You can see where this is leading, I'm sure. The commercial society has two options if it wants to survive: the corrupt, unstable, syndrome-mixing solution of hiring mercenaries, or the establishment of a second set of morals, one based on a willingness to take vengeance, even when it is not in your own self-interest to do so, one based on a willingness and an ability to use force effectively.
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<br />There seems to be an asymmetry between the two syndromes, reflecting the lack of proportion between the armed and the unarmed that Machiavelli described. The guardians can take over the commercial syndrome and society can still run, albeit not as successfully as it would with the two syndromes kept separate. But the commercial syndrome simply can't exist without guardians. Seen in this view, much of the structure of our government, from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta">Magna Carta</a> on down, can be seen as an elaborate scheme devised by the commercial folks to maintain the existence of guardians while constraining their ability to interfere with the commercial syndrome as much as possible. Balance of powers between legislatures, senates and executives, term limits, constitutions backed by legal systems, democratic elections, media watchdogs, etc. all serve (or at least can serve, if circumstances are right) to constrain the ability of guardians to take over the economy.
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<br />Beyond these institutional mechanisms, I see two other bulwarks against the guardian takeover of the commercial syndrome. The first is simply strong guardian morals. The shunning of trade by guardians, the fortitude that disregards material wants, the willingness to sacrifice for the community, all of these traits serve to prevent the guardians from using their privileged position to enrich themselves at the expense of the economy. The second is the existence of competition between nations. This seems a bit counter-intuitive, since competition between nations can take the form of war, which is the most guardian of all activities, but war requires resources to be prosecuted successfully, and a country which maintains a strong commercial culture will have more economic resources to devote to the war effort. And aside from war, the citizens of the country with the weaker economy will naturally want to see their country imitate the country with the stronger economy. We could see both of these forces at work in the Soviet abandonment of communism in favour of capitalism.
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<br />Similarly, it seems to me that two of the great flourishings of commercial life occurred in Greece and in Europe, and that both of these emerged from geographical areas where the terrain, combined with the technology of the time, favoured the creation of a number of small competing states.
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<br />Anyway, this was just another random train of thought post, the next post will examine the source of this bout of meandering.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/08/96-guardian-free-zone.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-307885509255917052011-08-02T19:55:00.000-07:002011-08-02T19:55:00.651-07:0095. Beyond Guardian and Commercial EthicsNote: This post is the ninety-fifth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />This week's topic is German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his efforts to discover a 'genealogy' or origin for our moral sentiments.<br /><br />The first time Nietzsche takes on this question is in 'Human, All too Human,' in the chapter, "On the History of the Moral Sensations." There's two main passages in this chapter that seem relevant to our series on ethics.<br /><br />The first, is paragraph 94, 'The three phases of morality hitherto':<br /><br /><blockquote>"It is the first sign that animal has become man when his actions are no longer directed to the procurement of momentary wellbeing but to enduring wellbeing, that man has thus become attuned to utility and purpose: it is then that the free domination of reason first breaks forth. An even higher stage is attained when he acts according to the principle of honour; in accordance with this he orders himself with regard to others, submits to common sensibilities, and that raises him high above the phase in which he is diverted only by utility understood in a purely personal sense; he conceives utility as being dependent on what he thinks of others and what they think of him. Finally, at the highest stage of morality hitherto, he acts in accordance with his own standard with regard to men and things: he himself determines for himself and others what is honourable and useful.; he has become the lawgiver of opinion, in accordance with an ever more highly evolving conception of usefulness and honourableness. Knowledge qualifies him to prefer the most useful, that is to say general and enduring utility, to personal utility, general and enduring honour and recognition to momentary honour and recognition: he lives and acts as a collective-individual."<br /></blockquote><br />There are a couple of points to highlight here. The first is the notion of patience or prudence, favouring the long run over the short run as central to morality, in particular to personal morality that maximizes one's utility. The second is the division of morality into a personal stage based on utility and an inter-personal phase based on honour. How similarly this resembles our split between a guardian syndrome filled with precepts governing our relations with others and a commercial syndrome which is primarily concerned with maximizing our own utility (although the commercial syndrome also covers inter-personal relationships manifested via trade).<br /><br />The second passage is paragraph 45, 'Twofold prehistory of good and evil':<br /><br /><blockquote>"The concept good and evil has a twofold prehistory: firstly in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. He who was the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and also actually practices requital - is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful - is called good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad. As a good man belongs to the 'good', a community which has a sense of belonging together because all individuals in it are combined with one another through the capacity for requital. As a bad man belongs to the 'bad', to a swarm of subject, powerless people who have no sense of belonging together. The good are a caste, the bad a mass like grains of sand. Good and bad is for a long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave. On the other hand, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. ... Our present morality has grown up in the soil of the ruling tribes and castes."<br /></blockquote><br />Unlike the previous quote, which is never really revisited much in Nietzsche's writings, this notion of the twofold origin of good and evil will be discussed in much greater length, first in the chapter 'The Natural History of Morals' in 'Beyond Good and Evil' and finally at book length in 'The Genealogy of Morals.'<br /><br />As he moves along, Nietzsche seems to become less certain about the morality level of Europe, and gradually begins to attribute the growing prevalence of 'slave' morality in Europe as being due to religious influence, from Christianity and Judaism. But the notion of two different systems of morality, one based on the ability and willingness to take vengeance and one based on non-violence persists in his thinking.<br /><br />In 'The Genealogy of Morals' Nietzsche identifies certain cultures as 'noble races' that hew to 'master race' morality such as the "Roman, Arabian, German, Japanese nobility", as well as the "Homeric heroes and the Scandinavian vikings." This is contrasted with primarily the Jews, but also on occasion the Chinese as cultures with primarily 'slave' morality. It seems unlikely to be coincidence that the two cultures that Nietzsche identifies as being emblematic of a 'slave' morality that doesn't use violence or take vengeance are two cultures that are renowned the world over for the commercial success of their citizens. <br /><br />Having said that, Nietzsche never really identifies salve morality with commercial culture. At first I thought that maybe that was just because Nietzsche was so guardian minded that he didn't even acknowledge the existence of commerce (even a guardian-type like Aristotle <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2010/07/politics_06.html">deigned</a> to denigrate commercial ethics as base and shameful). But as 'The Genealogy of Morals' goes along, Nietzsche shows his awareness of commercial culture as he traces our notions of guilt and personal obligation and even justice back to the "...oldest and most primitive relationship between human beings, that of buyer and seller, creditor and debtor." So it wasn't that he was unaware of commercial ethics, he just didn't link it up with 'slave' morality explicitly.<br /><br />So, it's not a perfect match, by any means, but still the notion of two ethical systems, one based on 'noble' races that are barbaric and love conquest and take vengeance and have good manners and one based on 'slave' races that shun violence, don't (can't) take vengeance and is associated with successful commercial cultures certainly lends some support to the notion that Nietzsche was working his way towards the notion of Guardian and Commercial ethics, although his remarkably strong guardian mindset may have skewed his observations somewhat.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/08/95-beyond-guardian-and-commercial.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-15778142076695992832011-07-12T21:05:00.000-07:002011-07-12T21:38:41.937-07:0094. Elements of a SimulationNote: This post is the ninety-fourth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />This week, I just wanted to think out loud about what elements would need to be included in a simulation designed to test Jane Jacobs' theory about the 'Systems of Survival'.<br /><br />The three basic elements I think we need are land, stuff and people.<br /><br />Based on the territorial nature of the guardian syndrome, it seems as if we need a model that allows for people to interact in a 2 dimensional territory in order to replicate whatever it is about managing land that lends itself to guardian activity.<br /><br />The interesting variations in the nature of the land that I see are that it could either be finite in size, infinite or it could be finite and also contain various natural boundaries (rivers, mountains, etc.) that would tend to foster distinct political groups forming.<br /><br />In addition, the land needs to support some sort of resource production, since we will need something for our people to take and trade.<br /><br />As for the people, they are more complex.<br /><br />First of all, people will need to have various ethical approaches open to them. Looking at Jacobs' list of precepts, I see the following minimum requirements:<br /><br />Use force and fraud (take) / Shun force and fraud (trade) <br />Work hard(er) / Take more leisure<br />Be obedient / Make your own decision about what is best<br />Be loyal / Be selfish<br />Be exclusive / Be open to dealing with strangers<br />Consume now / Invest to consume more later<br />Share wealth or dispense largesse / Hoard wealth<br />Compete / Cooperate<br /><br />Naturally, putting these options into concrete terms that can be coded into a simulation will be the tricky part.<br /><br />In addition, for obedience and dispensing of largesse to make sense, we'll need a concept of hierarchy or rank.<br /><br />For definitions of loyalty and exclusivity to make sense, we'll need a concept of groups or identity.<br /><br />If taking is an option, we'll need some sort of conflict resolution method, involving individual strength for our people as well as some logic for measuring the increase in combined strength that comes from cooperation. Note that relative strength could also function as a resource which is finite in quantity (although absolute strength would not be).<br /><br />If trading is an option, we'll need at least two different goods or resources in circulation, that are valued differently by different people. It may be interesting to add another element that is finite in quantity (besides land) to see if it is treated differently.<br /><br />If investing is an option, we'll need a function that translates investment of time and resources into more/different resources.<br /><br />People will also need an objective so that we can rank how 'well' they are doing in the simulation. Some possibilities:<br />Maximize wealth<br />Maximize consumption of comfort and convenience (resources)<br />Maximize rank<br />Maximize status<br />Maximize honour<br />Maximize population<br />Maximize some combination of these.<br />And of course any of these objectives could be for the person themselves, for the group they belong to or for all people in existence.<br /><br />Lots of possible combinations - you can see why economists like to simplify and pretend that people only care about their own personal wealth, but clearly this approach will be too limited to either represent reality or to help us develop a simulation that will incorporate the ethical choices listed above.<br /><br />Finally, we'll need to define how our people's behaviour works over time. Do people just have a fixed set of ethical behaviours and we see who does best. Or do we allow people to modify their behaviour based on the context (trading vs. taking), or to modify their behaviour based on the success of those they encounter, can a leader cause them to change their ethical approach, or do we just introduce random mutation into people's behaviour patterns and see how things evolve.<br /><br />Obviously, the number of permutations is large, even leaving out all the elements I've no do doubt overlooked here. It seems like it would be best to start with a simple scenario and then gradually elaborate it to take more elements and more complexity into account. But that's a task for another day...Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/07/94-elements-of-simulation.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-17699885534402020092011-07-05T21:38:00.000-07:002011-07-05T21:38:00.860-07:0093. Left and RightNote: This post is the ninety-third in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs defines two distinct syndromes, one covering commercial ethics and one covering guardian, primarily government, ethics.<br /><br />The last few centuries of politics in western countries has been dominated by a battle between two rival ideologies, the left and the right. It's always seemed a bit mysterious to me that certain groups of policies would end up neatly packaged along an ideological spectrum like that. Given the similar structure of the syndromes and the left-right political spectrum, I naturally wondered if there was any connection between the two syndromes identified by Jane Jacobs and the left-right political divide.<br /><br />Thinking about it a little, I don't think that an analogy to right vs. left really works, but maybe there is some connection to the distinction between <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism">conservatism</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism">liberalism</a>.<br /><br />The defining element of Conservatism is respect for tradition (a guardian trait) while Wikipedia defines a concern for equal rights which lines up with the commercial ease of collaboration with strangers and aliens, and contrasts with the conservative respect for hierarchy. Similarly, classical liberalism emphasized the role of free markets and that government needed the consent of the governed (respect contracts, come to voluntary agreements). Wikipedia says that, Edmund Burke, a famous conservative, "insisted on standards of <span style="font-weight:bold;">honor</span> derived from the medieval <span style="font-weight:bold;">aristocratic tradition</span>, and saw the aristocracy as the nation's natural leaders."<br /><br />When I think of our modern political parties of the left and right, however, even though the names Conservative and Liberal remain, there seems to be some drifting from the traditional Conservative and Liberal roles. The current 'Conservative' party is actually descended from the 'Reform' party, a movement which wanted to fight and overturn the existing hierarchy, and which wants to dispense with tradition in many ways, from the role of the Governor General to the Senate. <br /><br />Similarly, old-style conservatism involved the concept of noblesse-oblige, in which there was an obligation of the wealthy to help the lower classes, but in modern politics it is the left-wing which supports the lower classes, while right-wing policies generally favour the wealthy. Meanwhile, the Liberal party favours far more government intervention in the economy than would have been considered under classical liberalism.<br /><br />Looking back at the twentieth century, it seems that the World Wars and great depression led to a new political model, known generally as 'the welfare state' in which government directed a significant percentage of spending in the economy. Since then politics has divided between those who want to continue or expand that trend and those who want to go back to the 19th century of a much more limited government role in the economy.<br /><br />On the one hand, Jane Jacobs identified mixing of the morals from the two syndromes as the primary form of moral corruption. But on the other hand Jacobs identified a number of examples where government and the commercial sphere could use their respective strengths to accomplish things that otherwise couldn't be done. <br /><br />At any rate, words like Liberalism and Conservatism have so many meanings these days that maybe this post is just a waste of time, but it seems as though with the emergence of capitalism and the growing importance of the commercial syndrome, there was a period where the new commercial ethics and old guardian ethics battled it out in the political forum but in more recent years the lines have been re-drawn partly along class lines instead with the battle between the classes replacing the earlier battle between Liberalism and Conservatism. <br /><br />Of course, there is no reason why a party couldn't support implementing Jane Jacobs ideal vision of both syndromes in force, complementing each other as necessary, and kept separate where appropriate. But I guess figuring out just what that last part means exactly isn't so easy.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/07/93-left-and-right.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-55395427019563387982011-06-21T21:03:00.000-07:002011-06-21T21:03:01.304-07:0092. Information SharingNote: This post is the ninety-second in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />A number of posts ago, I <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2010/05/51-types-of-cooperation.html">discussed</a> an <a href="http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~jheath/BoC.pdf">essay</a> by Joseph Heath in which he posited that there are 5 distinct types of cooperation: Economies of scale, trade, risk-sharing, information transmission, and self-binding.<br /><br />This week I wanted to go into a bit more detail on the differences between information transmission and what we normally think of as trade, using the essay, "<a href="http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/newecon.htm">The Next Economy</a>" by Brad Delong and Michael Froomkin as a starting point.<br /><br />Delong and Froomkin set out 3 primary differences between information and more typical physical goods:<br /><br />1) Information is <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/06/14-public-goods.html">non-excludable</a> - Once a piece of information exists it is hard to control who has access to it (recall the friends episode where Chandler and Joey try to figure out the path that the information that Ross slept with someone else will take to get to Rachel). The primary implication of non-excludability is that goods might be under-produced (as compared to the socially optimal level of production) because people won't be forced to pay a price for the information that is commensurate with the value that information has to them (i.e. somebody might be willing to pay a high price for the latest Sufjan Stevens album, but instead just download a free copy off the internet). <br /><br />Society has generally responded to this lack of excludability by trying to restore it via copyright and patent laws that go after free riders.<br /><br />As Delong and Froomkin note, this is a balance between the costs of enforcement and the reduction in information sharing on the one hand, vs. the added incentives to generate valuable information on the other.<br /><br /><br />2) Information is non-rival - You can't really transfer possession of information from one person to another, you can only share it. Unlike, say, a chair which only one person can sit on at a time, an effectively infinite number of people can have access to the same piece of information.<br /><br />As the authors say, "the existence of large numbers of important and valuable goods that are non-rival casts the value of competition itself into doubt."<br /><br />In a goods market, when sellers compete on price they allow more people to benefit from the product being sold by reducing the price to their marginal cost. But with non-rival goods like information, the marginal cost is zero and if competition was to drive the price down to 0, the producers would go out of business. In this environment, competition might end up taking less beneficial forms than lower prices (e.g. methods to lock customers into your product and prevent them from having access to other providers).<br /><br /><br />3) Transparency: When you're buying a chair, you can usually get a pretty good idea of the quality and comfort of the chair before you buy it. But with information, this is much more difficult. If you don't have the information, how can you judge its value. If you do have the information, why would you pay someone else for it. Information is the side product that allows you to value <i>other</i> products before you buy them, but it is hard to make it work on itself.<br /><br />---<br />We can see that the unique nature of information undermines some of the traditional commercial virtues that make up the commercial syndrome.<br /><br />The benefit of competition is reduced with information. Both from economies of scale (people are better off browsing a single large library than they are searching through a million little ones.) and from the hazards of price competition in an environment where marginal costs are zero.<br /><br />The (financial) incentive to innovation and industriousness is lowered by the lack of rewards that may come for your efforts.<br /><br />The benefit of being honest is less when it is difficult for people to tell ahead of time if you are lying or providing a poor quality product.<br /><br />Respect for contracts is undermined by a legal system that places artificial restrictions on sharing of information that reduce overall social welfare and technology that makes evading those restrictions easy for anyone to do with little consequence.<br /><br />---<br />On the other hand, some commercial syndrome elements seem even stronger when it comes to information - shunning force makes even more sense when there is so little to be gained through the use of it (see the widespread disdain for industry groups that sue their customers).<br /><br />Collaboration with strangers has flourished in an era of information transmission.<br /><br />The quick transmission of information has led to a high regard (some might say too high) for inventiveness and novelty.<br /><br />---<br />With respect to the guardian syndrome, information does have some of the characteristics of <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/06/14-public-goods.html">public goods</a>, meaning that there are social benefits to government ensuring there is adequate production of them. And indeed government funds most basic research and takes a major role in transmitting information (via education) to each generation of citizens.<br /><br />But information sharing is no place for the use of force, or respect for tradition, and individuals and companies that spend their time in the world of information generation and transmission often seem just the opposite of stuffy government rules and procedures - so clearly information sharing is not a typical guardian activity.<br /><br />---<br />To be honest, I'm not sure quite what to make of information as an area of cooperation that seems to be distinct from both the traditional commercial syndrome ethics and from traditional guardian ethics. Maybe the unique nature of information demands its own set of ethics but the relatively new importance of information in the economy means that this has yet to be fully developed.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com1http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/06/92-information-sharing.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9145336.post-88199760542372259662011-06-14T20:28:00.000-07:002011-07-05T17:38:02.167-07:0091. Another View on the Evolution of CooperationNote: This post is the ninety-first in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/search/label/ethics">here</a> for the full listing of the series. The <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2009/02/1-systems-of-survival.html">first post</a> in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.<br /><br />I happened upon an <a href="http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/6639">interesting article</a> the other day by <a href="http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/493">Daron Acemolgu</a>.<br /><br />Acemolgu points out that researchers often use coordination models to study the level of cooperation in society because these models allow for multiple equilibria - i.e. one with cooperation, one without<sup>1</sup><br /><br /><blockquote>"Why do similar societies end up with different social norms, and why and how social norms sometimes change? A common approach to answering these questions is to use coordination games, which have multiple equilibria corresponding to different self-fulfilling patterns of behaviour and rationalise the divergent social norms as corresponding to these equilibria. For example, it can be an equilibrium for all agents to be generally trusting of each other over time, while it is also an equilibrium for no agent to trust anybody else in society. We can then associate the trust and no-trust equilibria with different social norms."</blockquote><br /><br />As he goes on to point out, this isn't a very dynamic analysis, in the sense that it doesn't answer the questions of why or how we get from one equilibrium to another.<br /><br /><blockquote>"Simply ascribing different norms to different equilibria has several shortcomings, however. First, it provides little insight about why particular social norms and outcomes emerge in some societies and not in others. Second, it is similarly silent about why and how some societies are able to break away from a less favourable (e.g., no trust) equilibrium. Third, it also does not provide a conceptual framework for studying how leadership by some individuals can help change social norms."</blockquote><br /><br />I didn't spring for the $5 required to download the full paper, but from the article it seems like one mechanism posited by Acemolgu for society to move from one equilibrium to another is if a 'prominent' person influences other people with their own behaviour.<br /><br /><blockquote>"A particularly important form of history in our analysis is the past actions of "prominent" agents who have greater visibility (for example because of their social station or status). Their actions matter for two distinct but related reasons. First, the actions of prominent agents, impact the payoffs of the other agents who directly interact with them. Second, and more importantly, because prominent agents are commonly observed, they help coordinate expectations in society. For example, following a dishonest or corrupt behaviour by a prominent agent, even future generations who are not directly affected by this behaviour become more likely to act similarly for two reasons; first, because they will be interacting with others who were directly affected by the prominent agent's behaviour and who were thus more likely to have followed suit; and second, because they will realise that others in the future will interpret their own imperfect information in light of this type of behaviour. The actions of prominent agents may thus have a contagious effect on the rest of society."</blockquote><br /><br />What strikes me, coming back to the discussion about coordination, is all the words we have that, in the right context, mean the same thing: coordination, cooperation, correlation, collaboration, etc. Naturally, the trick with a coordination problem is to somehow coordinate everyone's behaviour. A hierarchical structure can create a monopoly in which one entity/person controls all, thus greatly simplifying the problem of getting everyone to sing from the same songbook. When putting leviathan in charge isn't feasible or isn't desired, then it becomes trickier to get a bunch of independent actors to coordinate on a particular outcome.<br /><br />The 'prominent' person is like a soft version of the leviathan - not forcing everyone to go along, merely setting a good or bad example and hoping the ripples of that behaviour are enough to 'tip' society from one equilibrium to another. I didn't read the paper so I shouldn't really comment, but the notion that something like JFK asking people what they can do for their country is going to lead to a widespread change in behaviour seems hard to swallow for me. To me it seems more likely that levels of cooperation will be driven by a combination of history (as Acemolgu acknowledges) and changes in fundamental factors like technology (e.g. the medium is the message) and the natural environment (along the lines that <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/06/90-peak-oil-and-commercial-syndrome.html">I discussed</a> in my last post).<br /><br /><br />***<br /><sup>1</sup>Note: The Stag Hunt, that we discussed <a href="http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2010/08/63-stag-hunt.html">back here</a> is an example of a game theory model with more than one equilibrium.Declanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07930743440194279349noreply@blogger.com0http://crawlacrosstheocean.blogspot.com/2011/06/91-another-view-on-evolution-of.html